Page 5 - Hindsight Issue 26 April 2020

KetteRIng
KETTERING LONDON ROAD CEMETERY
David Brown
David Brown is currently the Chairman of the Friends of Kettering Art Gallery & Museum. He is a retired doctor whose two great passions are art and history. He regularly presents at Friends’ meetings and he organised the cemetery tours at the Kettering History Day.
Cemeteries and graveyards have always held a fascination for me. some think that it is morbid, or frightening to wander round them. Venturing inside a cemetery is an experience that has many different meanings to different people. You may have come to enjoy the peace and quiet; or to watch the wildlife; or to remember loved ones long gone. You may reflect on mortality and imagine how you would like to be remembered when the time comes. Will you be as well regarded as some of the people buried here?
The history of graveyards
A burial ground surrounds most town and city centre churches. over the centuries these land-locked buildings have struggled to find space for the bodies of the dead. At times of war or plague, the capacity
of the church authorities has been
overwhelmed. Various solutions have resulted: war cemeteries and plague pits, for example. sometimes local authorities have had to step in to provide public cemeteries. elsewhere, burials continued in the existing churchyard. the ground level rose and old bones accidently unearthed were removed and stored in charnel houses, or church crypts. gravestones were moved to the perimeter wall of the burial ground as newer ones were erected.
In Kettering, the solution to the overcrowding lay in a piece of church- owned land (so-called glebe land) on the London Road which was designated for the purpose of burial in the mid 1800s, and consecrated by the Bishop of Peterborough for the first burial in 1862.
London Road Cemetery, Kettering
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