In the Company of Angels

 The living and the dead,

The awake and the sleeping,

The young and the old

are all one and the same.

~ Heraclitus ~

Arnos Vale is a 45 acre green oasis of peace and calm in the middle of Bristol - a haven for wildlife - a place of 'heavenly works' created by man for man.

Almost 200 years ago the need for new burial places coincided with a trend for creating 'garden cemeteries'. The movement owed a lot to the fashion for all things classical, but was also inspired by Père-Lachaise Cemetery created in 1804 in Paris. By the time Arnos Vale Cemetery was opened in 1839, garden cemeteries were being established in other cities across England. The best known of these is London's Highgate Cemetery which has some of the finest funerary architecture in the country.

It is interesting that much of the religious symbolism in the cemetery that was so familar and known to our ancestors is often completely lost on us today.
A typical example above shows a pelican feeding her young. In medieval Europe, the pelican was thought to be particularly attentive to her young, to the point of providing her own blood by wounding her chest when no other food was available. As a result the pelican came to symbolise the Passion of Christ and the Eucharist, usurping the image of the lamb and the flag. There is a hymn by St Thomas Aquinas where the penultimate verse describes Christ as the 'loving divine pelican' able to provide nourishment from his breast". 

A cross is the most common furniture architecture in a cemetery closely followed by an urn. The urn  represents an ancient symbol of death and the drapes symbolise sorrow and passage from one existence to another.

In funerary architecture the white lily represents the idea of purification of a departed soul - sometimes you will see a broken lily which indicates that the person died before their time

This unusual tomb for Raja Rammohun Roy Bahadoor is based on one from Bengal in a style known as 'chhatri' - an elevated architectural Indian dome.  A commemoration is held here annually attended by Bristol's Lord Mayor together with the Indian High Commissioner and admirers of Raja Rammohun Roy Bahadoor, a noted social reformer and the "Founder of Modern India". He was visiting Britain as the representative of the Mugual Emperor, Muhammad Akbar ll when he fell ill with meningitis and died in Bristol.

The cemetery is a unique time capsule of the Victorian and Edwardian period where the listed memorials and gravestones pay tribute to more than 300,000 people from Bristol's past. The Victorians would lease family graves 'in perpetuity' or for 125 years without giving any thought as to who would pay for their care after that. 

Wandering around the area is redolent of a time long gone where thousands of family graves have been effectively 'abandoned' over the years meaning that there are no funds for the upkeep of the graves. Nature has stepped in - trees push their way through the tombs which are in turn covered in ivy and brambles.

 The Victorians spent large amounts of money on their tombs. This enormous obelisk would have cost over a £1000, representing £65,000 in today's money. 
 What is the fate of this sylvan Arcadian landscape?

Members of the Friends of Arnos Vale have set up a trust to restore and protect the cemetery, and an open competion has recently been won by an American design team from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture who submitted radical plans for its future. Their vision is to construct a constellation of lights among the woodlands around the cemetery, with each beacon glowing in remembrance of an individual. It is thought an urn containing the cremated remains would be embedded within the structure of the lamp, together with a digital depository of their online existence. 

Whilst respecting and preserving its past, could these radical plans be the future of Arnos Vale?  Personally I am not convinced that this is necessarily the way forward. However, it is imperative that this historic landscape with its Grade ll* listing should be preserved, and prevented from further degradation.