The Victorian cemetery at Nunhead lies semi-ruined but still has Gothic splendour. LIZ DURNO reports ...

There is a tranquil, 52-acre woodland — the same size as Hyde Park — nestled in the south-east of London?

It is a cemetery but that does not detract from the pleasure of wandering down its leafy avenues through the dappled sunlight, listening to birds singing.

In fact, the gravestones looming out of the heavy undergrowth and the ruin of the Anglican Chapel only enhance the romance of Nunhead Cemetery.

One of the great Victorian cemeteries, Nunhead Cemetery was founded in 1840 in response to a problem — all the graveyards at London city churches were full. Then, the area was outside London — Nunhead was just a hamlet.

“Kensal Green was the first of the great cemeteries,” said the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery (FONC) liaison officer and our guide on the cemetery tour, Rex Batten. “Then Highgate Cemetery was built in the north followed by Nunhead in the south.” It started as a commercial operation run by London Cemetery Company (LCC), which had shares on the London Stock Exchange until the 1960s.

“Like going to the theatre,” Rex explained, “the best seats were more expensive. The most expensive plots were along the main avenue at the top of the hill because, come judgement day, you’d be the first in line.” Those interred in common graves were buried in less popular plots, unmarked prior to 1918, and with only tiny gravestones after that.

The deepest recorded grave was about 30ft deep — 18 coffins, one on top of each other and then six feet of earth on top.

“But the business had disaster built into it,” said Rex. “The only source of income was selling burial plots. Plots were sold in perpetuity — unless you were poor and buried in a common grave, in which case you had no rights at all.” Unsurprisingly, 250,000 burials later, it ran out of space.

By the late 1950s its great days were past and the cemetery was the target of vandalism. In 1969, the owners locked the gates and walked away.

For the next 12 years, nature took over and it turned into a woodland rich in wildlife.

FONC was formed in 1981 and carries out restoration and maintenance in the cemetery, except in the area still used for burials. A £1.2m lottery grant in 1998 has been used to make the chapel a safe ruin, restore the paths and save 50 monuments.

Rex is a mine of information about the people buried there, from showmen, soldiers and shipping magnates to engineers, whose contributions to society were significant beyond London’s boundaries.

Some of the monuments are sobering as you realise these people, who were extremely important in their time, now lie forgotten in overgrown graves and decaying tombs in the Gothic gloom.

As Rex says: “It tells us a lot about mortality. We can build monuments to ourselves but this is what living is about.” Nunhead Cemetery is open every day but FONC has free guided tours of the cemetery, in Linden Grove, SE15, on the last Sunday of each month at 2.15pm. Call Rex Batten on 020 8693 6191.