Bunhill Fields burial ground off the City Road, London is the resting place of several notable Londoners.
Bunhill Fields burial ground's historic significance has been recognized by its designation as a grade II listed building, as part of the Bunhill Fields Burial ground and Finsbury Square conservation area. It is the last resting place for an estimated 120,000 bodies. The site has a long history as a burial ground, but is most significant for its Nonconformist connections, dating from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and the burial of prominent people including William Blake, Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan and Susannah Wesley. The significance of the burial ground is recognised by the designation of its historic landscape as a Grade I listed entry on the National Register of Parks and Gardens. Bunhill Fields also forms part of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground and Finsbury Square Conservation Area and has 75 listed tombs within its boundary. The current layout of Bunhill Fields Burial Ground dates was developed in two main phases. The first of these was in the 1860s, when the City of London improved the site: laying out paths, undertaking tree planting and carrying out work to the tombs including re-cutting and recording inscriptions. In the 1960s another layer was added to the site with a sensitively designed public garden by one of the foremost landscape architects of the period, Peter Shepheard. The southern area remained dominated by the memorials, fenced off from public access by metal railings, while to the north a new open lawn enclosed by shrub planting was created to complement the memorial landscape. The burial ground now contains 2,333 monuments, mostly simple headstones (of which there are 1,920). Many of the graves are packed closely together, giving an idea of how London's burial places looked before large cemeteries further from the centre of London opened from the 1830s onwards. (Source: City of London Website
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Location: Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, 38 City Road, London, England, UK
Photo credit: © Graham Johns / Alamy / Afripics
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Keywords: bunhill, burial, city, fields, gravestone, graveyard, green, ground, iron, london, monument, peace, railings, road, space, tomb, tranquility
