Monuments Walk with Dr Roger Bowdler - 30th July 2026

Monuments Walk

with Dr Roger Bowdler

Kensal Green Cemetery

Walk · Coffee · Lunch

30th July 2026

SOLD OUT

Cemeteries replaced churchyards as the main place of urban burial in the early 19th century. Inspired by Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, private British firms saw an opportunity to create new landscapes which would appeal to romantic sensibilities and combine landscaping, Neo-classical buildings and a growing assembly of monuments. Kensal Green, opened in 1833, was London’s first and remains in many ways the finest. Inside Zone 2 – yet surprisingly unknown to most – it contains the graves of notable people – Brunel, Thackeray, Trollope and children of George III – and some of the finest tombs ever raised in Britain. This walk will look at some of the sepulchral gems and consider how designs for tombs developed, the different ways of expressing grief, and how masons and sculptors worked together. The end result of these encounters with the dead is surprisingly life-affirming.

Dr Roger Bowdler will guide us through this vast cemetery, selecting monuments of particular interest as well as the Dissenters’ Chapel and colonnades surrounding it. There is a great variety of monuments to be seen, from the Indian sandstone tomb of Daboda Dewajee and Henry Pegram’s sculpted woman grieving over the grave of Ninon Michaelis to the more modern carved effigy to Joshua Compston, the Factual Nonsense art promoter closely associated to the YBA group of the 1990s. We will learn about the architectural developments in the monuments and the context behind them, prompting us to consider how attitudes towards funerary monuments have changed over time.

To read more about his work, you can purchase Dr Bowdler’s recently-published book, The British Cemetery: Architecture, Landscape, Sculpture from Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles and Blackwell’s.