Posted on 07/03/2006 8:25:45 PM PDT by blam
For sale: old, second-hand graves. £3,000 each, many careful owners
By Stephanie Condron
(Filed: 04/07/2006)
A cemetery is offering second-hand graves, with "refurbished" monuments including headstones, obelisks and crosses, to be used again.
Recycled burial plots, complete with the original memorials, still contain the remains of those who died at least 75 years ago - the names of the dead are simply scoured from the monuments to allow new inscriptions.
The City of London cemetery is selling 1,000 such plots advertised as "traditional-style graves" to be "adopted" by families willing to pay £3,000 to lease them for 50 years.
The 200-acre cemetery, built in 1853 by the Victorians in Manor Park, east London, is one of the largest in Europe. But, like cemeteries across the country, it is running out of burial space.
Manor Park is understood to be the first to consider selling memorials with old graves as part of the solution.
The City of London corporation says many graves were dug deep enough to allow for more coffins and re-using the memorials is good conservation.
Ian Hussein, the cemetery manager, said: "The issue of shortage of burial space has been around for a long time.
"The only viable way forward is to reuse the graves. We are reusing the monuments too. Many had only one or two in them so there’s room on top for more.
"We did not expect it to be that popular because it's a complete change of our culture. But we were surprised by the uptake.
"A common response is to think, 'Ooh, that’s a bit disrespectful'. But I tell people it’s better to use old English stone that's been quarried already than to use stone that's imported from all parts of the world and does not really fit."
It is illegal to disturb human remains but Parliament is considering allowing authorities in London to rebury old bones in abandoned Victorian graves deep enough to allow for more coffins - if there are no surviving relatives who object.
The scheme, assisted by English Heritage and the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, has been running for 10 months and nine families have signed up for plots.
"When someone purchases a grave they adopt that original memorial," said Tim Morris, the institute's chief executive. "New inscriptions can be put on and everything is kept in character to the original. Some of these elaborate Victorian memorials could probably not be bought nowadays.
"Cynics say, 'They are selling people's memorials' but that is not the case. It would be immoral to just sell them but that's not being done. They are being adopted."
Burials account for 28 per cent of funerals and cemeteries short of land are finding new ways of creating plots.
They include covering abandoned graves with new soil and building overground catacombs.
Annie Kiff-Wood, of the charity Cruse Bereavement Care, said: "It will seem very strange and disrespectful to a lot of people, but while so many of us want to be buried these issues have to be faced. "This is something we in modern society are going to have to get our heads around."
Time to start building catacombs.
I struggled to even understand what I was feeling at reading this article... I have to say your comment just about sums it up for me.
"It is illegal to disturb human remains but Parliament is considering allowing authorities in London to rebury old bones in abandoned Victorian graves deep enough to allow for more coffins - if there are no surviving relatives who object."
Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad.
I don’t know if this is true at least not of older traditional English culture.
Specifically I recall in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when Hamlet returns from England to Denmark he comes upon the grave digger digging up an old grave and removing the bones to make room for Ophelia.
I don’t know if Shakespeare was speaking of English habits or Denmark’s but I would suspect he was describing English habits because he was writing for an English audience.
Since you say that he signed the docs hours before his death, I suspect he didn't run down and do the actual rental. Who ever did is an accomplice. This isn't cute. It's thievery, plain and simple. The flippant tone in which you present it disgusts me.
It would be just my luck to buy a grave and have it go condo on me.
"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
To digg the dust enclosed here!
Blest be ye man that spares thes stones
And curst be he that moues my bones."
The company declined to take legal action. Smart move.
They would have had perfectly reasonable grounds to do so. Your (or your relative's) actions were clearly out of line.
I sure hope they don't dig into graves of smallpox victims. There was actually an outbreak of smallpox in 19th century London when some 18th century graves were disturbed.
don’t know if Shakespeare was speaking of English habits or Denmark’s but I would suspect he was describing English habits because he was writing for an English audience.
My grandmother is buried in Tuscany and if the family does not continue to pay a fee, the bones are dug up and placed in an ossury and the site is, I assume, resold.
I never heard about this but, I confess to have wondered if it's possible.
I don’t know what Lokibob’s relative was worth but it seems more reasonable that they would place a lean on the estate for the cost of the Tux.
Is your grandmother buried in a church yard or public cemetery?
I think it is a town cemetary although it could be affiliated with the Church. It is not a churh yard.
I think it is the town.
I thought it might be a church yard, it was the practice (maybe still is) to charge rent for a pew is Anglican churches.
I read about it in the book Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox. The book was released September 2001, and it had incredible timing. It was just before the terrorist attacks on September 11 and a month before the anthrax attacks on the US Senate via the US mail.
Another good book on the topic of biological warfare is The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story. 
Jumping in someone's grave...not nice.
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