Nunhead Cemetery

People sometimes ask me why I would want to visit a cemetery, to which I usually reply: “It's like a park, just better”. This is especially true of Nunhead Cemetery in London. Apparently it used to be a lawned cemetery with a few trees here and there, but somewhere during the 70's it became full and without any new “tenants”, it had no income, so they stopped maintaining it. Over time the lawns have turned into overgrown woodlands with hundreds of hidden tombstones lining the narrow pathways breaking away from the main road.























Which brings me to my next topic: Roads. I originally planned to start this post like this:


“Daniel's Road was a very short road, leading straight to the cemetery. Not a very cheerful sentence to start a story with, but only if you're reading it in an overly symbolic kind of way.”



I would then continue to tell a strange, overly symbolic, self-referring, metaphorical, paradoxical tale full of life lessons, starting with the night before:

“The conversation in the lounge at Daniel's house-share house turned serious. The topic was The Future and being not quite sure what the next step should be. It was clear that everybody in the room, including Daniel, was feeling some kind of pressure, whether it was from parents who expected a life with more direction, girlfriends wanting more stability or simply the nagging desire for adventure, caged in by time or financial constraints. They all felt the need for some kind of change, but nobody was completely sure of which direction to take. With his mind full of questions, Daniel went to bed, deciding that the following day should be spend reflecting on the past three months in London. Trying to make sense of it all, deciding where to take it from here. And what better place for contemplative reflection than a cemetery”

Then I would go on to describe how I discovered Daniel's Road opposite the cemetery and how it became a metaphor for my life's journey after I had a deja vu like sensation of the surroundings reminding me of places I've never been to and memories of events I've never experienced.












It would end with me realising how much I'm missing because I'm tangled up in my own though processes:

“He wandered the whole of the cemetery, and later the rest of the neighbourhood, wrapped up in his own thoughts, finding hidden meaning in things around him, trying to make sense of things, running the whole day over in his head, describing it before it even happened, attaching his own interpretation to everything. And then, at the top of the hill he came to a realisation. All this time he spent living in his own mind, he was actually wandering around oblivious to the reality of the things around him. The beauty of the shadow play on the autumn leaves on the ground escaped him, he was deaf to the calls of the magpies and crows mixing with the sounds of a wind chime somewhere in a tree and the delicately crafted stone angels and gargoyles staring at him all went unnoticed."




















"He knew what to do, he quickly found a bench to empty his thoughts into his notebook, so he could continue unbothered by them and spend what was left of the day just experiencing everything around him."



"He spent a few minutes there, writing furiously and when he got up he was blissfully aware of the fact that he had no idea what was going to happen next, simply because he wasn't planning it.





He also realised how lucky he was to be a character in this strange, overly symbolic, self-referring, metaphorical, paradoxical story, because in real life one rarely gets a second chance to go back to what we missed the first time round.”

You might have noticed that I even considered writing it in the third person to convey the almost out-of-body dettached set of mind I was in.

I eventually realised however, that it would take a very experienced writer to make that kind of story work and even then most people wouldn't find it as cool as I first thought it would be. Also, it would have been just plain weird. But in a way my uncompleted little mind-trip story still says a lot about the effect Nunhead Cemetery had on me. You see, these old cemeteries have a very unique atmosphere to them. A peaceful, almost mystical kind of ambience where I sometimes lose myself in reflective thought and contemplation. And that's exactly what happened to me in Nunhead. A very powerful experience, but very difficult to convey. Something you have to experience for yourself to understand.

I was going to end the story by saying:

“Daniel's Road might be a short road with a hilltop cemetery to the south, but you can also choose to look north, down the hill, for a great view of the City. You might even be able to see St. Paul's Cathedral and the Eye of London, not visible in this photo, but to experience that you have to be there in person.”







If you where actually looking for some facts on Nunhead Cemetery and read through all my ramblings without finding any, you might want to visit Wikipedia or the Southwark Council website.