Sherds was intrigued to encounter two interesting items recently that have to do with the treatment of human remains. (Anyone who is grieving or has suffered a recent bereavement might like to skip over these reports.)
The first was an advertisement for a Victorian Society field trip to Woking Crematorium, the first building of its kind in the UK, designed in 1885 for the Cremation Society of Great Britain.
The proposed building attracted a great deal of opposition from the local community at the time, so Sir Henry Thompson, President of the Cremation Society (and Surgeon to Queen Victoria), stated that the crematorium must be ‘agreeable in appearance… harmonising with the surrounding woods’ and should have ‘reassuring ecclesiological associations’ to pre-empt any suggestion that cremation was a ‘heathen process’. To that end, the Society chose a church architect – Edward Francis Channing Clarke – to design the Gothic chapel, cloister, and columbarium.
