The graveyard in the city has long been an object of anxiety and municipal frustration. In his last years, the venerable Christopher Wren advised that any new churches in urban areas should not have graveyards attached to them. He had seen first-hand the unpleasant and unhygienic effects of overstuffed graveyards in the City of London, centuries of burials pushing the ground level as high as the church windows.
Instead, he proposed the foundation of new, spacious cemeteries, ringing the suburbs of the city with a “graceful border”, so that “the dead need not be disturbed at the pleasure of the sexton, or piled four or five
