Chris was barely awake when we got to his place, a little past nine in the morning. That used to be early for me, too, at least on a Sunday, but of course our body clocks were hopelessly scrambled and, taking a clue from last year, we were determined to get out and stay in motion, lest we slide further into sanity-flattening narcolepsy. He let us in, half-asleep, nodded with semi-acknowledgement of our immediate plans, gave us a key and shuffled back to bed.
We had two London cemeteries planned out that appeared to be within walking distance -
Fulham Palace Road, and
Margravine (aka, Hammersith). We had strolled through the vast and grimly elegant
Old Brompton Cemetery last year, one of London's famed
Magnificent 7 and barely a mile from Chris' flat, but I had found a couple of others on Google that were...well, not
really in the neighborhood, but close enough for us to walk to and kill off a day. I had it in my mind we'd spring for a cab ride to one, then hoof the rest of the day, but Sharon encouraged me to just suck it up and walk; she wanted to see more of the city and I didn't really protest.
We unpacked the cameras, loaded up fresh batteries and headed out north to Old Brompton Rd, which turns into Lillie Rd, and pointed up more or less straight to the graveyard.
There was a classic Mustang parked in front of Chris' flat. It was my first picture of the trip - still don't know why I shot it. The steering wheel was missing - a theft deterrent, I assumed, since the car was gone the next morning.
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| Mustang, parked in the wrong direction and no steering wheel. |
So we walked.
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| The Goose. |
And walked.
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| A funeral home, in a Muslim neighborhood. Somewhere in West London. |
Sharon had a rough handwritten map that she cribbed from the Google map (we could have used the GPS on her phone, since we paid for a data plan, but we were intent on being pretty stingy about tapping that, and anyway...the place was supposed to be close.) Yeah, we got a little lost a few times, but so what? We were in London, we had all day, the weather was hazy sun and warm.
Fulham Road Cemetery, about 13 acres in size and (like Margravine) in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, dates to 1865. We were met with a sign that we didn't understand. And we didn't even look it up until after we got home. It's since become sort of our tagline for the trip.
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| Don't do it, mate. |
We know what it means now, so no need to write in.
Unlike the weedy and morose Victorian gloom of Brompton, Fulham Palace was a tidy and spacious place.
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| Fulham Rd Cemetery |
Sue, the London Cemetery
blogger, says that the borough responded to some incidents of vandalism in the 1980's by "grassing over" some grave sites, thus rendering parts of the cemetery rather empty of monuments. We didn't know this at the time; the place did have a weirdly uneven sense of space about it, probably heightened by a grounds-tidiness acutely lacking in Brompton, which was the only other proper cemetery we had visited in London. But the place was nice, with mature shade trees and good sight lines.
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| Fulham Rd Cemetery |
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| Fulham Rd Cemetery |
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| Dastardly squirrel - Fulham Rd Cemetery |
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| Fulham Rd Cemetery |
The best memorial was the dead-Victorian child effigy, merely yards from the entrance.
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| Fulham Rd Cemetery |
We rested at the WW1 memorial - I was already getting my left-side torso stitch; a dull, grinding pain below my left rib cage, a bit of discomfort I encountered acutely walking around York's muni cemetery the year before, and somewhat less annoyingly at various other times. I don't know what it is. I get it when I go to England, maybe it's a sea-level thing, yeah?
Long walk to Margravine,
which is alternately referred to as Hammersmith.
Dating to 1868, relatively late in the timeline of the Victorian municipal cemetery boomlet, Margravine was somewhat smaller than Fulham Palace Road, a central walkway cut down the middle. There were some kids playing and the usual assortment of older folks and stroller moms; smaller cemetery, more foot traffic. Like a lot of the cemeteries we saw on this trip, one section was left un-mowed and only lightly tended to; it's some program that municipalities seem to be adopting to accommodate more wildlife and keep parts of the cemetery 'in their natural state', never mind that their natural state shouldn't include loads of dead bodies six feet beneath the surface.
But the place was okay, relatively peaceful but never really out of earshot from the honking and wooshing of London traffic.
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| Margravine Cemetery |
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| Margravine Cemetery |
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| Margravine Cemetery |
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| Pillow of stone - Margravine Cemetery |
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| Green - Margravine Cemetery |
We headed back up Lillie road toward Chelsea. As it happens, the route back angled us to Brompton Cemetery, the less busy rear entrance, so we strolled in and shot some parts of the cemetery we missed last year.
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| Brompton Cemetery |
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| Brompton Cemetery |
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| Brompton Cemetery |
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| Brompton Cemetery |
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| Brompton Cemetery |
Toward the front, we encountered a friendly bloke in a blue track suit and some dubious dental health, relaxing on a step enjoying a Bud Light bomber. Struck me as a little odd, since I had just seen a couple of cops strolling the cemetery - maybe open container laws are different in London?
He told us that a nurse somewhere that morning fixed his bum leg with a sharp tug, relieving him of the concerns of going into surgery, and he was celebrating in the cemetery with a cold beer. (A Bud Light??) I don't know if he was homeless. Kind of a tossup; we weren't going to ask.
We told him we were just starting our vacation ("Oh
York," he enthused, "I love it up there..." ), and told him we liked to photograph cemeteries. Famous people? he asked, and pointed in the direction of a couple of famous dead guys neither Sharon nor I had ever heard of. No, just cemeteries, we told him. All kinds, everywhere. He asked where we were from, didn't know where Colorado was, and told us his daughter was living in New York City, determined, in his words, "to find herself a rich American husband. A doctor, maybe..." We said we wished her good luck, and him too, and we meant it. And then we said goodbye.
On the way out, we went through the immense cloister area. A professional photographer was doing some kind of a fashion shoot with a model. We smiled and ducked between them while he was futzing with his flash, but I managed to get a shot of the model. I thought Sharon was going to slap me. No idea what they were shooting for.
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| Fashionista in Brompton portico. No glove, no love. |
We found a headless angel stone. They're not rare, but this one really grabbed us both.
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| Headless angel - Brompton Cemetery |
Enough dead guys for one day. We made our way out to Fulham Road, headed north and finally made it back to Chris' flat. I was beat. Stuff looks closer on Google Maps than it really is.
The Thing begins in earnest tomorrow morning.
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