I’m going to start calling this series ‘Abandoned City
Political Ecology’, because I realise I’m straying farther and farther from
outright ecology, which I’ve barely dealt with. I hope it’s obvious from my
writings that I’m more interested in how the imprint of the human animal fits
into the world, teeming with our nests and colonies, our wounds and
inflictions.
Like any cultural practice, how we choose to deal with our
dead has morphed into traditions drastically different from their progenitors.
You don’t see a lot of humongous pyramidic tombs constructed for the dead any
more, do you.
From November 2020 until March 2022 I worked as a ‘cemetery
operative’ in Bristol. This is a very ‘paperwork’ way of describing a
gravedigger who also (and mainly) maintains cemetery grounds. I’ve mainly been
working at Greenbank cemetery, the second oldest (established in 1879) and
second biggest cemetery in Bristol. Arnos Vale is the oldest and biggest, and,
while the land is owned by the council, is managed by a private trust. I have
had ample opportunity to work at many of the council’s 8 other cemeteries to
perform various duties, but mainly to rush in and help out on digs and burials
(or ‘seeing in.’)
The majority of these sites are fairly old, at least late
1800s or early 1900s, with one modern site at South Bristol. This has given me
a time to reflect on cemeteries in the scope of a cities entire lifetime.
Cultural changes in these places are actually visible; grave stone styles
reflecting cultural moments and even societal attitudes around what is and
isn’t appropriate on a site- Avonview cemetery still has the brass screen
behind it’s chapel (now a staff building) that was an outdoor Victorian urinal.
A dog walker once said to me while we were chatting during
grass cutting at Ridgeway cemetery that we stood in a ‘vast social document.’
This comment has remained in my graveyard ponderings. It was fitting she said
this at Ridgeway. This site is partially rewilded, with the forested part of
Eastville park oozing into the bottom half of the cemetery. As a result, the
cemetery had a gradient where it started with grass cover, before developing
woodland verge habitat and finally outright woodland. Cemeteries do seem to
rewild fast; Bristol’s oldest cemetery, Arnos Vale, has many partially rewilded
spaces and wildlife-friendly measures that include rewilding in their
management plan. Some of the practices we developed at Greenbank could be seen
as rewilding, whether they remain now I’ve left; log piles, dead hedges, some
long grass tolerance, leaving wildflower areas alone etc.
The layers are deeper at Ridgeway. During world war two, a
bomb exploded on site, leaving many stones with visible shrapnel marks. The
site, though very small, actually had staff on site in the old days of council
greenspaces having much more labour & labour intensive practices. The staff
hut at Ridgeway burned down at some point, leaving only a flat concrete
foundation and apparently taking the records for all the graves with it. This
means if a grave is to be dug on the site, the department has to go through a
lengthy checking process to determine the location of the family plot and the
authenticity of the family of the deceased.
All of these tidbits of time gone aside, envisioning these
sites as a ‘document’ is just too accurate. We file bodies away, stamp a stone
with their details, and, once the place is full, maintain the record lest we
need to refer back. There are a few sad expressions along the lines of ‘you die
three times; once physically, again when there is no one left who remembers
you, and again when your gravestone falls.’
What hope is there for graveyards in the situation of urban
abandonment? Personally I think it’d be sad for the stones to become completely
unreachable. These can be more direct emblems of who made up an urban society
before abandonment than other ruins; even now we find relics preserved on them,
job descriptors that are basically defunct (or at least past their boom years)-
‘cartwright’ or ‘farrier’. You can even find documented places of birth, and causes
of death. All tell the story of a societal fabric, and how tight it may have
been cast.
There is the utmost chance that graveyards will rewild
faster than anything; like parkland, the unattended shrubs, trees and grasses
will simply revert to a natural tendency. Cemeteries have a headstart in that
they are often quieter than their surroundings and so nature has been hiding out unhindered for a
while anyway. This may be aided by our more and more unobtrusive and
sustainable burial practices- even if a gravestone is used in a traditional
plot, often they are smaller and low-lying stones. Should a city become
abandoned, its hard to believe that we are not merely leaving behind a
perfectly packaged immediate woodland.
