Dig into the graveyards of 19th century London. As London’s population doubled in its early decades, so did the numbers dying. Where to bury them? The deep attachment to burial in parish churchyards waned as layers of coffins raised ground levels high above the street while backlogs of the unburied became a rat’s delight. Churches acquired extra land. The lecture covers recent excavations which reveal how this plan did not relieve the pressure for long, with families designing tombs to thwart the bodysnatching ‘Resurrection Men’. Scandal broke out over a chapel with thousands of rotting bodies discovered in its crypt, just as the Magnificent Seven garden cemeteries were beginning to flower outside the city limits. They were – and still are - places of landscaped beauty, of tranquil reflection for the living as well as gardens holding spectacular monuments to the dead. The lecture ends with the legacy - the railway stations taking corteges to funerals in rural settings, an underappreciated Jewish burial ground, the municipal cemeteries and pocket parks of today.