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Whatever they do to the graves, it cannot be worse than what happened back in the 1700's and 1800's when cemeteries got overcrowded. Purely coincidentally the St Pancras one (or, at least, the St Pancras cemetery next to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases) was created after the old one became so overcrowded it was actually dangerous. Some poor old biddy was killed when a coffin burst out of an emankment after the putrid body expanded too much... (see Ackroyd's Biography of London or Roy Porter's Social History of London for all your gory details!) They had limbs sticking out of the earth, the whole shebang.
After the exploding coffin incident they had some sort of resorting business whereby old graves were re-located but, as far as I can tell, the entire job consisted of just piling up earth and remains in carts and moving them to a big pit just outside London as it then was - so nothing really changes in some ways.
Purely for interest's sake, it turns out that the problem of overcrowding in urban cemeteries explains the fact I used to puzzle over - all those old tombstones right up against the wall of a cemetery. Where was the body, I used to think, when there is no room between the headstone and the wall? Probably being used as building rubble, came the answer, as the stones had only been moved there on the bodies etc. being moved elsewhere. |
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