Death by design

Pyramid, park and pyre

That we will all die at some point is a given, but what happens after we die is largely a matter of design. The funerary landscapes that we encounter in present-day Australia were shaped by radical decisions made in Victorian-era London, at a time when the architecture of death was comprehensively reimagined by architects, innovators and ideologues.

England’s population more than doubled in size during the Industrial Revolution, growing by nearly nine million people between 1801 and 1850. The unprecedented concentration of people in cities caused an equivalent increase in the numbers of dead. By the early nineteenth century, London’s burial grounds were so overrun that many had swollen metres above the level of the pavement, with human remains strewn about and gravediggers exposed to typhus and smallpox.

In 1824, architect Thomas Willson claimed to have solved this burial crisis with a single big idea. Willson proposed the construction of a Metropolitan Sepulchre