Additional
notes by Brian Fisk
St. George's Burial-ground,
Mount Street.
Now
an enclosed park with buildings not so high as to dominate but
pleasantly enclosing. Many of the surviving stones are laid so as to
hold the flanking slopes.
Tall
plane trees make the park pleasantly shady in summer. Information boards
give detailed information on the site.
1¼ acres. Laid out as
a public garden, and beautifully kept by the vestry. The ground dates
from about 1730, but there are very few tombstones. (Holmes)
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St. George’s Burial-ground,
Bayswater Road.
St George's
Fields is a 70s housing development on the site of the burial ground.
The five acre site
was opened in 1763 to relieve the older ground, and closed in 1854,
though there are reports of later burials into the 1860s. The
vestry resisted closure: the Board of Health report of 1850 describes
body parts hanging in a tree, barrowloads of undecomposed body parts
tipped into a pit - and
prints the Rector’s letter claiming there was room for more. Flats and a locked private
garden now cover most of the site, but there is a small surviving
garden with stones at the walls attached to a nursery school.
Most of the headstones were removed during the First World War so that
the ground could be used for allotments. Between the wars rthe land
became an unofficial recreation area used for archery, tennis, etc. The
ground was cleared in the late sixties. The
entrance is on
Albion Street.
Lawrence Sterne was buried here.
Laid out by the vestry, the gravestones having been
placed round the walls. The approaches to this ground are its chief
drawback, and it is not visible from any public road. One entrance is
through the chapel facing Hyde Park, and the other is in a mews. It is
about 5 acres in extent.
(Holmes)
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