Catherine Arnold – Necropolis

Books on London can be generally separated into two categories. Firstly, there is the weighty, intellectual guide to the capital, exemplified by the likes of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. These books will generally weigh about as much as a dog, and will almost certainly reference ‘psychogeography’. The second category plays host to books which are considerably lighter, both in terms of subject matter and physical heft.

Necropolis sits in the latter category. It has a quirky subject matter, and could be read on a long bus journey, making it perfect for the London dilettante. Whilst lighter on jokes than, say, Tom Moore’s books on London, it is an easy, light read, big on anecdote, with plenty of opportunities for picking up trivia.

As the title should make clear, Necropolis focuses on London’s dead, from the Anglo-Saxon settlements through to Victorian funeral rituals, the Blitz, and ultimately Diana Spencer’s funeral. Catherine Arnold hopes to use the development of attitudes towards death to paint a wider social picture of London society.

Arnold is strongest, and most comfortable, in talking about Victorian funerals. This is possibly down to a paucity of materials regarding earlier ceremonies, and a lack of physical evidence, which may in itself suggest a less reverential attitude to the dead. She writes strongly on the plague, where she may borrow from Defoe and Peyps, and on royal funerals, but common deaths are largely passed over, pre-nineteenth century.

Her writing on Victorian funerals and the development of London’s great cemeteries is certainly interesting. The strict caste system of Victorian society is underlined here by the separate train carriages used to transport upper and lower class corpses to the great suburban graveyards near Woking. The sections on the development of the great London cemeteries, such as Highgate, and the conversion of dilapidated burial grounds into municipal parks are also informative.

Arnold surmises that the Victorians embraced death, and funerary rites, as a means of cementing ones status, with even paupers spending well beyond their means to afford a ‘decent’ burial. According to her thesis, this elaborate ‘packaging’ of death fell out of favour in the wake of the appalling slaughter of the first world war; suddenly, the death of one individual seemed far less important.

Other points of interest include Arnold’s account of the titanic struggle for the acceptance of cremation as a legal form of funeral, and the treatment of suicides. According to Arnold’s research, the practice of burying suicides at crossroads with a stake through the heart carried on until the early nineteenth century, and gruesome evidence is occasionally unearthed during excavation work.

In its latter stages, Arnold points to a recent trend away from sombre burials towards a more celebratory event, with black garments expressly banned. The author doesn’t really present an explanation for this development (a fear of mortality, a desire to hide away from the reality of death, changing attitudes towards the afterlife?), which is frustrating. In fact, beyond suggesting that the funerals of those killed in the 7/7 bombings in London are proof of London’s cultural diversity, Arnold really fails to get to grips with the post-war world.

Her account of Diana’s funeral feels somewhat tagged on, and the paragraphs on 7/7 are a little clichéd. The section on Diana brings me to my next complaint: why can’t sub-editors apply decent grammar to the books we read? And how did a professional publisher have the nerve to release a book which gives the title of the biggest selling single of all time, ‘Candle in the Wind’, as ‘Goodbye England’s Rose’? It’s not hard, is it? Mistakes like this, and missing full stops from the end of sentences, can’t fail to annoy the reader.

Whilst Necropolis doesn’t have the sustained quality of Steve Smith’s ‘Underground London’, it presents plenty of information for a casual reader, and is written in a fairly engaging style for the most part. Maybe it falls between stools a little at times, being not weighty enough for the expert, and slightly dry for the beginner, but on the whole, it’s diverting enough, and I suspect that’s the point.