Taphophile Tours. Brompton Cemetery – Part Two

Part two of the Taphophile tour of Brompton Cemetery in West London looks at the unique features of the grandiose graveyard and ventures into it’s Victorian catacombs. The contents of which are rather gruesome.

Inspired by St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, the central focus of the cemetery is the open air cathedral of death known as the great circle. IT definitely lives up to it’s name. The immense crowd of crucifixes and monuments gathered within the confines of the colonnade boundary resemble a packed train station during rush hour. The number of former lives commemorated within the coliseum of impressive classical architecture makes is an immense spectacle.

Beneath the arched walkways of the great circle lie the ominous catacombs. A failed business venture from the Victorian era catacombs were seen as a cheap alternative to traditional burial. Families could shelve their dead like old tins of tuna without forking out for an expensive ground plot and stone monument. Thousands of spaces were created beneath the main structure of the circle, like a giant pantry for corpses, however only a few hundred were ever sold. The serpent guarded iron doors at the bottom of the cracked stairwell let’s you know that there’s something sinister lurking behind those bars. It takes a few seconds for your eyes to adjust to the dark abyss and a further few seconds to compute what you’re actually seeing but, yes, that’s an actual coffin rotting away right in front of you. Thick wooden caskets stacked neatly behind rusting cages. In case someone tries to escape? Each gated entrance you peer through, there’s a fair few in total, presents a scene so disturbing it’s easy to forget that these aren’t props from an extremely realistic haunted house at a fairground. The musky smell exacerbating the uneasiness. Most of us don’t see many coffins in our lifetime so to find hundreds stacked together in one place so openly is a bit of a shock. Fascinating nonetheless. In an extremely macabre way. But then again that’s the reason you peeped through the doorway in the first place. Morbid curiosity.

Away from the gloomy seclusion of the dark catacombs is the leafy east side. In such close proximity to Stamford bridge stadium, home of Chelsea F.C, that you can’t help but wonder if particularly wayward shots at goal end up bouncing off of headstones during matches. Strolling around on game day must be an odd experience as it’s fairly unusual to visit a cemetery with the cheering of 40,000 fans in the background. Not that some of the interments would mind. Chelsea F.C founder Henry Augusus Mears is buried here and would probably be rather proud of his teams success in recent years.

Other notable bones resting at Brompton include Victorian physician and clean freak Jon Snow. The guy responsible for adoption of anaesthesia so thank him next time you’re having a tooth pulled. Revolutionary feminist Emmeline Pankhurst. Art lover Henry Cole who not only established the nearby Victoria and Albert museum but also invented Christmas cards. So thank him next time granny sends you a little card with a robin on the front and a fiver stuffed inside.

It is believed that renowned children’s author Beatrix Potter borrowed many of the names of her most famous characters from the headstones of Brompton gravesites. There’s an actual Peter Rabbet buried here as well as a Mr Nutkins and Jeremiah Fisher. Transport between the world of fiction and reality by paying respects to the remains of your favourite childhood characters who are named after long dead Victorian Londoners stuck in the ground long before you were even born. Poetic.

Esteban.

Click here for part one to read about the bizarre story of Chief Long Wolf , the Sioux warrior buried in London.

Click here for part one and part two of the Taphophile tour of Colchester, Britain’s oldest recorded town.

Crazy in Love

Nobody wants to die alone. You’ve read horror stories about noticing an ominously expansive brown stain on the ceiling accompanied by a rotten festering smell and a recent abundance of house flies later revealed by authorities, who burst into the flat upstairs, as the result of the decomposing remains of an elderly neighbour. The lifeless corpse sitting unnoticed for six months in front of a television playing Top Gear re-runs on Dave. Chilling. To avoid this grisly isolated fate we pick another human and cling to them for life. Happily ever after.

Methods of instigating courtship evolved from the straightforward grunts of caveman ancestors to the delightfully simple swiping of a smartphone screen. Tinder elevates individuals to the power level of a Roman Emperor. An enthusiastic thumb up for romantic glory. An apathetic thumb down for desolate loneliness. The App may be unashamedly shallow and superficial but at least it’s honest. It allows the execution of horrendously subjective opinions based entirely on appearance and the pitiful attempt at individuality via three “About me” sentences. All the while without the subject ever having to know about your wildly judgmental opinions based on how agreeable you find their face and/or tits. Genuis. Of course Tinder is essentially a hyper-speed dating version of the now archaic match.com style of internet dating. Who has time to set up a flattering online profile of themselves these days except lonely spinsters and sex offenders? And match.com is just a twenty first century update of the aptly titled lonely hearts adverts where pre-internet generation losers advertised themselves in a local newspaper alongside second hand lawnmowers and disused bed frames. All these adaptations of coaxing another person into touching your private parts manipulate the original form of finding a partner which required physically presenting yourself to a person and using verbalisation, body language and appearance to convince them that you’re not a sociopath or murderer. So much effort. No wonder Tinder took off.
Need to work on opening lines

Our brief exploration into the history of the advance of tactics Homo Sapiens have utilised in the perpetual quest for a shag followed by a long walk in the park leads one to ask why the fuck the Metro (the free newspaper read by commuters to avoid making eye contact with each other) publishes a daily feature called Rush Hour Crush. It’s a mind bogglingly antiquated waste of ink. Using a newspaper to find a date in this day and age is like buying a top shelf mucky mag in a time where youporn.com exists. Particularly baffling about the feature is its utterly creepy peeping Tom format. It’s not a lonely hearts feature in the true sense. It’s a public amnesty forum for stalkers.  Weirdoes admitting that they’ve been obsessively admiring an unsuspecting stranger from afar during the morning commute. Dreaming of a delusional, fabricated fairy tale life with somebody whose name they don’t even know. Secretly glaring every dawn, convincing themselves that it’s a totally normal behaviour and not obsessive at all. The type of person who writes into Rush Hour Crush is the same kind of person who gets off the bus three stops further than they need in order to spend more time in the presence of a girl or guy who is oblivious to this disturbing idolisation. Sitting close enough to see them but far enough that they never notice. The kind of maniac who consciously studies the shift patterns of an attractive barrister at Costa. Getting suspicious cravings for coffee at the corresponding times.  The kind of emotionally unstable fanatic who mistakes the innocent pleasantries a Pret-a-Manger employee is contractually obliged to say as a declaration of everlasting love.  Convincing themselves to act upon their lustful impulses in the most pathetic and fallible way possible.

The thought process behind submitting a Rush Hour Crush paragraph is completely schizophrenic. Assuming the object of desire (or potential victim) actually reads the fanciful mutterings printed and is able to recognise that the ambiguous description provided is actually referring to them, it takes a complete detachment from reality to think anybody in their right mind will react to the cryptically lustful ramblings of an unknown admirer with anything but alarm, panic and a quick Google search about restraining order law. How can anybody think this will result in a successful investment of passion? Nobody has ever read the disorganised fantasies of a potential sex attacker and thought “look at that, too shy to speak to me in person but brave enough to publish an anonymous epigraph specifically about me in a national newspaper. That’s the kind of sane, rational behaviour I want to invest my trust in”.

Lit Erotica courtesy of Greggs Bakery
Truly sinister are the attempts to be light hearted and humorous. It’s like reading whimsy chat up lines penned by Peter Sutcliffe. There are chilling undertones beneath every innuendo. The kind of distasteful suggestive quips James Bond wouldn’t get away with let alone some scruffy singleton leering from a Northern line carriage. “To the stunning brunette in high heels and smart black blazer on the Metropolitan line from Baker street. It looked like you were heading to an important meeting. How about we meet up and discuss some business of our own sometime?”. Imagine actually saying that to somebody in real life. You’d rightfully end up with a smack round the chops and an injunction about remaining three hundred yards away at all times. These trailing psychotically suggestive word salads are as far away from sexy, alluring and romantic as a Stephen King novel.  The entire feature is a monumentally pointless endeavour. The only people likely to react positively to such bizarre declarations of admiration will never get to read them in the first place as the metro isn’t distributed at Broadmoor Hospital. Literary love advances inspired by Ted Bundy are rarely well received.

on the 09:34 to Southampton

The only reasonable explanation for the DAILY publication of this insanity is that it’s actually a craftily constructed honey trap set up by the special victims unit in collaboration with local psychiatric institutions. Sending off a snippet results in a four AM knock at the front door where you’re faced with three constables, a psychiatric nurse, a straight jacket and a long list of questions about your whereabouts last Thursday night. If that’s the case then Rush Hour Crush is actually an ingenious and valuable public crime fighting service. So if you’re going to jerk off to the mental image of the cute blonde Superdrug sales assistant who gets the same central line train as you every morning it’s probably best to keep it to yourself. She likely thinks you a creep anyway and only smiles at you out of nervous fear.

Esteban