Tower Hamlets Cemetery

The last of the Magnificent Seven to open (1841), Tower Hamlets Cemetery teems with the dead of London’s East End, many of whom occupy unmarked graves stacked up to eight coffins high. In her 1896 book The London Burial Grounds, Mrs Basil Holmes wrote that the cemetery’s ‘gravestones are tumbling and lying about, apparently unclaimed and uncared for, amongst dead shrubs and rank grass’. Also lacking the grand and extravagant graves of its siblings, and now surrounded by city tower blocks and housing, Tower Hamlets Cemetery could easily be considered the most depressing of the Magnificent Seven. Nonetheless, it is amongst the most interesting with a curious ambience and darkness of its own.