From the top of One Tree Hill in London, you can see the outskirts of Camberwell’s Old Cemetery. Like many of the famous cemeteries around the capital – Highgate, nearby Nunhead, Abney Park – it was created in the 19th century, when the area was still considered suburban. As the city has grown up around it, the cemetery has filled and turned slowly into a patch of gently overgrown woodland. It’s the perfect place for an afternoon walk or some urban birdwatching. But all that might be about to change.

“In 2013, local people were woken up by the sound of chainsaws in the cemetery, cutting down an ancient hawthorn hedgerow,” says Blanche Cameron, chair of the Save Southwark Woods campaign. (“Southwark Woods” refers to Camberwell’s old and new cemeteries.) Despite the protests of residents, the council has begun to “mound over” all the old public graves, and cut down several acres of mature woodland. It will soon begin the process of reselling burial plots whose residents died more than 75 years ago. They will be dug deeper down, leaving room for another burial on top. According to the council, there is simply no more room.

What should we do with our bodies when we die? The answer might seem so obvious that most of us give it very little thought. We have two options – burial or cremation – and we’ll probably go for the one that we personally find least unpleasant, if we can bear to think about it at all and not leave the decision to our relatives. According to Dying Matters, an organisation that aims to help people talk more openly about death, only a quarter of us tell someone what our funeral wishes are. Maybe the rest of us are just philosophical, or uninterested, or don’t want to make a fuss. What does it matter, after all, when you’re dead?

I’m not a fan of having tissues everywhere. It makes people think they’re expected to cry

The trouble is, it matters rather a lot. While we’ve been busy ignoring the facts of our own mortality, the business of burial has been sinking into crisis. “What’s happening in Southwark is a test case for the rest of the country,” Cameron says. “People don’t realise that their local cemeteries are at risk.”

According to a survey by the BBC, about a quarter of all councils in England think they will run out of space in their cemeteries in the next 20 years. Some believe the solution is to reuse burial land. In 2007, the law was changed so that graves could be released after a number of years (at the moment, this applies only in London). However, this isn’t an option for many people who prefer burial for religious reasons: they need to be interred in virgin ground. And unless something changes soon, many of us won’t be able to afford to be buried. Research into “funeral poverty” by SunLife insurance suggests the cost of dying is rising faster than the cost of living.

Although cremation now accounts for about 70% of funerals in the UK, there are concerns about the environmental impact, as well as the general state of crematoria. “There are some I’ve seen that are dirty, uncared for, where the chapel is moulding and odd cables are sticking out of the walls,” says Louise Winter, a funeral celebrant and editor of The Good Funeral Guide. “It can be heartbreaking for families. They don’t always notice it at the time of the funeral, but then, when they go back to collect the ashes and see the stained carpets and peeling wallpaper, it’s like an added blow.”



Personally, I always assumed I’d prefer cremation, but then I hadn’t thought about it much. I have only ever been to two funerals, both in the same crematorium in Hendon. Until now, I have given my own funeral arrangements significantly less thought than I have the recycling of pizza boxes. I am 38, healthy and not planning any bungee jumping trips any time soon. But maybe that makes this a good time to think about disposing of my body in a practical, ethical and emotionally healthy way.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The council is clearing woodland in Camberwell Old Cemetery in south London and ‘mounding over’ graves to resell plots. Photograph: Save Southwark Woods/Friends of Camberwell Cemeteries

It may even be that there’s no better time. There’s a growing interest in the “death-positive” movement, an umbrella term for the funeral professionals, artists and academics trying to raise awareness and debate around issues of death and dying. Winter is one of those people. She left a career as a creative strategist to become a funeral celebrant, partly as a response to a relative’s funeral that she found “awful, expensive and completely irrelevant to his life”. She says, “I think for a long time we’ve been stuck with a sort of postwar hangover of funerals. We pushed them as far away as we could from our everyday experience. But what I’m seeing is people who want to engage with them.” Death Cafes, where strangers meet to talk about matters of dying and remembrance, can be found at venues across the UK, and Winter is a regular speaker at events such as last month’s Designing Death at the University of Greenwich.

“The idea that we don’t talk about death is false,” says John Troyer, director of the Centre for Death & Society, based in Bath. “We talk about it all the time. What we don’t always talk about is our own death.” We can’t answer questions about what a good death is, or how best to deal with our dead, unless we engage with our own mortality. Could we find ways that not only allow the bereaved to heal, but also help the rest of us to live?

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“Just look at Jane – look at how fantastic she looks.”

I am looking at Jane. Jane is not looking back at me. Jane is dead, and I am wondering whether it’s polite to stare at someone if they can’t stare back at you. She is in the care of Poppy Mardall, a London-based independent funeral director. Jane’s cremation is tomorrow morning, and she’s about to be laid in her flatpack, cardboard coffin.

For most of us, funeral directors are the gatekeepers to the world of bereavement. We don’t meet the mortuary technicians, the embalmers or the crematorium staff who look after our loved ones when they die – “and that’s a shame”, Mardall says, “because most of them really care about what they do and they never get a chance to meet the families”. Instead, we’ll probably end up dealing with the funeral director who was recommended to us by the hospital, or who came up first on the Google search.

The funeral business in the UK can be divided into two camps. About a third of businesses are owned either by the Co-operative Group, or by a company called Dignity. Many of the funeral parlours owned by these companies will keep their family business “shop front”, with the parent company logo appearing somewhere more discreet. The other two-thirds of the market is made up of small businesses like Mardall’s. The industry is worth around £2bn a year, and the average cost of a funeral, with a wake, headstone, flowers and estate administration, is now almost £9,000. “The questions I hear the most from families are, ‘What should we do?’ and ‘What do other people do?’” says Mardall, who started her business in 2012 and has since won a number of industry awards. It’s common, she says, for funeral directors to be quite resistant to what families want: she has worked with a lot of people who come to her having met with hostility from more traditional funeral parlours.

“I think the fact that the industry isn’t very regulated can be good, in that it means you have a lot of choice about how you commemorate that person,” Mardall adds. If you want to keep the body at home until the funeral, for example, you can. “But the downside is that some companies will take advantage of that, particularly with pricing. Others just have very set ideas about what they will and will not do for families.”

From the outside, the mortuary at Poppy’s Funerals is Victorian gothic: lots of heavy stonework and high arches. Inside, it is light, cool and calm. In an antechamber reserved for families, Mardall picks up three boxes of tissues and puts them back in a cupboard. “I’m not a fan of having tissues everywhere. It makes people think they’re expected to cry.” There is a cot in one corner, and bright artwork everywhere. The mortuary itself is behind large, locked double doors. It is a little like a stationery cupboard, thanks to the stack of flatpack coffins in one corner, which are mostly used as a light and cost-effective solution for cremations (a no-frills service costs £1,950).

Some bereaved families want to be very hands-on, dressing their relative, brushing their hair, putting on lipstick

Jane is due to be cremated the following morning. It is a rule at Poppy’s that the family’s point of contact will always be present when the body is laid out, to stop the process from becoming anonymous. People are always referred to by name. Like three of the other present occupants, Jane is still in the hospital gown she died in, but she will be cremated naked, cocooned in a plain white sheet. “It’s really up to families how much they want to do at this point,” Mardall explains. “Some want to be very hands-on, and take charge of dressing their relative, brushing their hair, putting on their favourite lipstick. We had a family last week who brought in their mum’s wedding dress. It still fitted her.” None of the corpses Mardall deals with is embalmed. She does not employ any of the more traditional morticians’ techniques, such as putting a stitch in the mouth so it remains closed. “It’s invasive, and really not necessary. Why not just leave the body in its natural state?” She is quite passionate about this, hence the encouragement for me to take a very good look at Jane.

I didn’t know Jane, and I don’t know how painful her death was – although she is very, very thin. But her cheeks are smooth, her forehead unlined. She is a little waxy, her eye sockets just starting to sink, but there is nothing uncomfortable about looking at her. I watch as the team goes over her body, slowly, carefully, checking for IV lines that the hospital might have left (there’s usually at least one), removing them as gently as they would if she were alive. They check she has ID on her wrist. There must always be one piece of ID on the body. They lift her from the gurney to the coffin and cover her with the sheet before removing her hospital gown, in much the same manner that a professional masseur makes sure your dignity is intact when asking you to turn over. They tuck the sheet lightly around Jane’s body, leaving her head and face uncovered. The team talk to each other, but not as if Jane wasn’t there. Their focus is on her, absolutely.

Death may not always be gentle and clean, but this level of care should be standard. If all families could be reassured that their loved ones were treated this way, it would be a good first step in saying goodbye.

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“It always seemed to me that I would live better, and die better, if I gave the whole business some thought,” says Sophie Churchill, founder of the Corpse Project, which launched in 2015. Part listening project, part research network, part information service, it aims to encourage people to think harder about what should happen to their body after death. It has published reports on the history of burial, the environmental impact of cremation, and the rights of trans people after death (your gender at death may be recorded as your gender at birth, and battles between executors and next of kin can be very complicated).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘If you’re not anywhere near a woodland burial site, you have to factor in the emissions created by travel.’ Photograph: Alamy

We have met in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London, in the middle of a very wet afternoon. As we fight through horizontal rain in search of a cafe, I tell Churchill that I want to know the best options for my own death. “I think that it can be a very useful thing to do,” she says. “If everyone set aside half a day a year – what’s that, 0.5% of your time? – to think about what they wanted, actually to visit crematoria or research all the possibilities, it could solve some problems. It could be a very grounding, healing, helpful thing.”

Churchill became interested in the subject about 20 years ago, after attending a workshop. Her background is in forestry, and the environmental concerns interest her. “I’d say that part of our remit is to find ways gently to puncture the ‘truths’ around burial and cremation that people take for granted,” she says. For example, do scattered ashes nurture the earth? Contrary to popular belief, a thick layer of ash really isn’t going to do much for your roses. It’s better to mix ashes sparingly with a good layer of compost.

I say that I’m quite taken with the idea of being buried beneath a tree, in a special “cocoon pod” that I saw online. Churchill points out that, while there’s nothing wrong with that, it doesn’t do much for the tree. “Trees thrive better in relatively poor soil.” What is more beneficial, from an environmental point of view, is a shallow burial. But it’s not too hard to imagine why people might find that idea uncomfortable.

What’s the greenest way to be buried? “It’s not always that straightforward,” Churchill answers. “Cremation demands a lot of energy, but then, if you’re not anywhere near a woodland burial site, you have to factor in the emissions created by travel.” In fact, research by the Corpse Project found that “mourners’ travel” was the most significant contributor to carbon emissions at any sort of funeral.

At some point, a graveyard becomes a national asset. It becomes a thing of beauty

In a few years, there might be other practical options. Churchill tells me about the Urban Death Project in Seattle, where a team of architects has been working on plans for a memorial site with a large composting structure at its heart. Bodies would be concealed within high walls and left to break down gradually over time. Meanwhile, in Florida, funeral directors are increasingly working with alkaline hydrolysis, or “liquid cremation”. It doesn’t actually involve cremation at all, but is a way of dissolving the body until nothing but a fairly harmless bio-fluid is left, which can then be flushed away.

This may sound extreme, but then cremation was considered taboo in the UK until as recently as the 1950s. “All these things we consider custom or tradition have a habit of changing,” says John Troyer. And people are surprisingly open to change. Troyer worked with Redditch council in Worcestershire to explore whether it could heat one of its swimming pools with recycled energy from the nearby crematorium. “People were more resistant to the cost than to the idea itself.”

The way we see the body is changing: it used to be a precious artefact, and for many it still is, but there’s also a growing feeling that our bodies have huge potential to be useful after our deaths. In a sense, Troyer says, this is what organ donation is: using the body’s assets. Why not go further and talk about using our bodies as fuel? We may not be ready to accept the idea of bodies being used to power vehicles, but who’s to say we won’t be doing it in 100 years?

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Re-using graves means UK cemetery will never run out of space Read more

I like the idea of my body as biomass. It isn’t romantic, but it feels more meaningful than burial for my remains to help others after I die, whether it’s through organ donation or by helping someone to heat their home (or swimming pool). The physical space for remembrance doesn’t feel so important. In the age of Facebook, which by the end of this century will likely have more dead members than living, perhaps we will learn to be more pragmatic about our bodies, and worry instead about the digital selves we leave behind.

In the meantime, what should we do with the graveyards we already have? In Germany, some are being turned into playgrounds, to give them double protection from developers. A cemetery near Barcelona has had thousands of solar panels installed, enough to power a village. Troyer has been working on the Future Cemetery project at Arnos Vale in Bath, investigating how augmented reality could be used to memorialise people and preserve the heritage of such spaces. Campaigners in Southwark would love to see the Camberwell cemeteries turned into a national memorial park to preserve both the graves and the precious inner-city woodland.

“At some point, a graveyard becomes a national asset. It becomes a thing of beauty,” says Lewis Schaffer of Save Southwark Woods. “I was walking through the cemetery the other day and met a man who pointed out the gravestone of a 23-year-old man who died in 1922. According to this guy, the young man had died at the Sicilian house of occultist Aleister Crowley, and his girlfriend insisted he’d been poisoned by Crowley – he ended up taking the woman to court to clear his name. Just think about all the stories there are behind these tombstones, that people expected to be here for eternity. They shouldn’t be taken away.”