"Cemeteries today play many roles in the lives of the living. In a relentlessly urban environment, they are used as visitor attractions peaceful and green open spaces, outdoor art galleries, sites of pilgrimage, places to play, to sleep, to have sex, to think, to walk the dog, to hang out with friends, or maybe to have a beer. But this can sometimes be vulnerable to development plans and the demands for new housing, roads and services for the living. With the intense competition for space in London today, little space is available for the living, let alone the dead."

London is running out of burial space. Inner London boroughs have on average seven years' burial space left. Two of them, Hackney and Tower Hamlets, have no space left at all. With intense competition for space, do we still have room for the dead, and if so, where?

Photographs of crematorium interiors and oral recordings of people involved in the disposal of the dead offered insight into professions rarely discussed in public.

Objects on display explored the many facets of our attitudes to death. They ranged from an Early Bronze Age cremation urn and recently excavated Roman grave goods to an environmentally friendly contemporary cardboard coffin.

An exhibition of wicker coffins in 1875
Francis Seymour Haden's 'Earth to 'Earth' system was based on allowing the body to decay naturally. He believed that burial in wooden coffins resulted in 'festering tenants inperpetuity of the soil' and that cremation would needlessly pollute the air. He promoted the use of easily degradable coffins, notably wicker coffins, arguing that they would enable burial in the same land every five or six years.

This display explored issues we would rather not face and asked the question - what will happen to our bodies when we die?

How should Londoners dispose of their dead? People came and aired their views at a debate on 6 September, when the motion was: 'Must London face up to reusing graves?'

Memento Mori - Contemporary photography by Agustin Amate Bonachera
31 August 2000 to 8 October 2000
In a series of photographs of Victorian and Edwardian sculpture in the cemeteries of London, Agustin Amate Bonachera explores the transient nature of human existence, capturing a society's belief in the divine and immortal.

 
Coffin plate and mourning jewelery

Enon Chapel Cemetery and Dancing Saloon, in The Poor Man's Guardian,1847

Between 1822 and 1842 the Minister of Enon Street Baptist Chapel in Clements Lane Facilitated the disposal of an estimated 10?12,000 people in its cellar removing bodies when more space was needed this edition of The Poor Man's Guardian featured responses to an earlier report which described how while dances were held in the chapel above in the cellar below on all sides lay human remains broken coffins and other emblems of decayed mortality

 
Sir Henry Thompson demonstrating :
a cremation oven in 1874
Published in illustreret tidende, 1874

In 1874 Sir Henry Thompson, surgeon to Queen Victoria, founded the Cremation Society and began to promote cremation. He argued that it was a more sanitary method of disposal and less space consuming than burial, as well as being more economical. After initial Home Office hesitancy, the first official modern cremation of a person took place in 1885 and a Cremation Act was passed