London's Pyramid for the dead

It was to be an epic construction dominating Victorian London's skyline – a mighty pyramidal necropolis designed to be the final resting place for up to five million people. Duncan Haskell unravels the history of a landmark that just might have been...

A blueprint of Thomas Willson's Metropolitan Sepulchre 

If you’ve ever found yourself wandering around the capital thinking: “I like London a lot but what it’s really missing is a giant pyramid filled with dead people”, then your wish was almost the command of Royal Academy trained architect Thomas Willson.

In 1829 he proposed a unique solution to London’s overcrowding of its inner-city cemeteries. Coming at the height of the capital’s love of Egyptiana, the answer was quite simple – the Metropolitan Sepulchre on Primrose Hill. Designed over 94-storeys high, towering above St Paul’s Cathedral, and covering 18 acres of land, this mausoleum would house 40,000 new bodies each year with a capacity for five million cadavers. There would also be chambers for the superintendent, sextons, clerk and a keeper. Anyone picnicking on Primrose Hill would be able to enjoy the splendid company of this labyrinth for the dead.

It was planned as an investment opportunity with backers acquiring stocks in the Pyramid General Cemetery Company. Catacombs could then be rented out at £50 per vault to make everyone a tidy profit. Unfortunately, the idea didn’t leave the drawing board and the question of London’s overpopulated graveyards was answered by the proliferation of garden cemeteries, such as Kensal Green and Highgate. It’s a great shame that this architectural enigma was never built, not least because having a colossal necropolis on the doorstep might have frightened off the Primrose Hill set.

Words by contributing editor Duncan Haskell

Classic hats: the Trilby

Allon Zloof, founder of London hat maker Tom Smarte, is your guide to choosing a timeless classic to suit your face shape and complement any ensemble – starting with the trilby

Fur felt Trilby, £295 Photo: Hanson Leatherby

The word 'trilby' was coined from a theatre adaptation of George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby, when a hat was worn at the first London production and referred to as the ‘Trilby hat’. It has a slightly narrower brim than a fedora, around 4cm, and is often made with a pinched or teardrop crown.The brim tends to be upturned at the back and sometimes snapped down at the front. A trilby comes in a variety of fabrics including felt, wool, cotton and straw.

Who it suits

If you’re lucky enough to have an oval face, any style of hat would suit you, especially a trilby. The medium brim would add balance to a short face.

How to wear it

A trilby can be either smart or casual – the look you’re after will determine how you wear it.The classic smart way would be the same as the fedora – placed from the front of the head to the back. For a casual look, wear it on the back of your head; placing it from back to front, showing the underside of the brim.The trilby is the perfect accessory for a jeans and t-shirt outfit, layered with a field jacket.

This is a sponsored blog post, created in collaboration with Tom Smarte. For more information on partnerships and joining our directory, please email advertise@ernestjournal.co.uk.

The Maidstone Iguanodon

Glimpse quickly at the Maidstone coat of arms and at first you may not notice the strange haughty-looking lizard wielding a shield with a lion. Guy Lochhead shares the curious history behind this strange beast, with a spike for a thumb, which was found embedded in Kentish rock in 1834.

Nineteenth-century painting showing Iguanodon in a tripod pose.

In the early 1800s, there was a spate of paleontological discoveries that pushed our understanding of dinosaurs to new levels. Fossil collector Mary Anning’s 1811 discovery of a huge crocodile-like monster at Lyme Regis led many amateur geologists across Britain to fervently reassess their finds. While in 1824 clergyman and geologist William Buckland accidentally undermined his faith with the discovery of a “great lizard”– megalosaurus – in the Cotswolds. 

Further east, physician Gideon Mantell was examining giant leg bones he’d found in Tilgate Forest sandstone, wondering if they might also be from one of these new prehistoric beasts by examining the age of the stone they were embedded in. While Mantell worked as a doctor, his wife, Mary Ann Woodhouse, would also go fossil-hunting. One day, in 1822, she found some large teeth in that same layer of sandstone. Gideon noticed that they had a strange resemblance to those of the extant iguana, but 20 times larger. He called this giant “Iguanodon” – the second dinosaur to ever be named – and proposed a huge, herbivorous reptile. The announcement was met with derision, since plant-eating reptiles were so rare, and it took three years for his findings to be accepted.

In 1834, a more complete skeleton was discovered at Bensted’s Quarry in Maidstone, reaffirming Mantell’s ideas. The significance was enormous – for the first time, palaeontologists could begin to speculate as to the form of these monsters. Friends of the Mantells bought the rock from the quarry master for £25 and named it the “Maidstone Slab”. Gideon examined the bones embedded in the rock alongside the old teeth and drew a massive iguana, perched incongruously on a branch, quadrupedal, grinning madly, wielding a stubby horn at the end of its nose. This strange assemblage gave the first glimpse of what our planet’s previous tenants might have looked like.

After providing this insight, Mantell’s life became tragic. He moved to Brighton and his medical practice failed. The council intervened and turned his house into a museum, but Mantell’s generosity and enthusiasm for fossils meant he waived the entrance fee to the point where the project was unsustainable. Within five years, he’d sold his entire collection to the British Museum for £4,000, Mary left him, his son moved to Australia, his daughter died and he suffered a carriage crash that left him with a spinal injury and chronic pain. He became addicted to opium and overdosed in 1852, fell into a coma and died. He was credited with naming four of the five known genera of dinosaurs at the time of his death.

The Iguanodon features on the Maidstone Coat of Arms

In the Maidstone coat of arms, his marvellous beast stands erect on its hind legs, with the fossils he’d drawn as a horn worn proudly as thumbs – quite different to that first rough sketch. As more finds emerged, we have been able to augment and clarify his work. We have learned that iguanodon is a genus, not a species; that they did walk mainly on all fours, though they may have stood to feed; that they were indeed herbivores; and that the “horn” was in fact a thumb spike, though we still don’t know its function.

Proudly anachronistic beside the petty symbols of patriotism and governance, the Iguanodon stands for something far greater. Through the medieval language of heraldry we can look back a 150 million years, past the Victorian scientists who gave us this perspective, to the Late Cretaceous period. It gives us a perspective beyond our pomp and ceremony and shows that we are just this land’s current tenants. This hasn’t always been Maidstone, and nor will it always be.

You can visit the Mantell Monument at Whiteman’s Green in West Sussex, and see the Maidstone Slab in the Dinosaur Gallery of the Natural History Museum

Words by contributing editor Guy Lochhead

Lingua Pluvia

A nation obsessed with all things meteorological might be expected to have more than a few words and phrases for rain, and Britain doesn't disappoint. Here is a light shower of words for precipitation

Is it siling down or is it merely a haar? freeimages.com

haar

Also known, rather poetically, as a sea fret, haar is sea fog accompanied by very fine drizzle that creeps inland from the North Sea to the east coast of Scotland and northeast England. Undeniably atmospheric, a thick, chilly blanket of haar can hang around for days or disperse within hours.

siling down

Probably derived from sila, the Scandinavian word for sieve or strainer, siling down is a Yorkshire dialect phrase for heavy rainfall. In Ross Raisin’s 2008 novel God’s Own Country, Sam Marsdyke observes,“You’d have to be proper daft to go on a wander while it was siling down like this.”

raining cats and dogs

This oft-said phrase is believed to derive from the sight of dead cats and dogs being carried along the filthy streets of 18th-century London after heavy rain; a sight recorded by Jonathan Swift in A Description of a City Shower.

roostan hoger

The rain-sloshed, wind-lashed, almost treeless Orkney Islands off the north east tip of Scotland offer at least 20 descriptive terms for rain. Roostan hoger describes a steady, light drizzle. Other Orcadian words for describing the same type of rain include a murr, a hagger and a drivv.

dringey

Although one of the driest counties in Britain, Lincolnshire dialect is awash with words for rain, including dringey; a term that describes the kind of light rainfall that, despite your best efforts with umbrella and waterproofs, still somehow manages to leave you thoroughly soaked.

Brian Chapman is a freelance copywriter based in Kendal, Cumbria. He doesn’t climb mountains, swim in lakes or cycle uphill. He likes cities, people-watching and looking busy in coffee shops. He should probably live in London.

 

 

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John Bigg: The Dinton Hermit (1629-1696)

In Oxford's Ashmolean Museum you will find a pair of rather cumbersome looking shoes, the result of hundreds of separate pieces of leather being nailed on top of one another. They tell the story of one John Bigg, the 'Dinton Hermit', who was once the executioner of the King and took to living in a cave for his remaining forty years

We all know what it’s like to work really hard in your job only to see the fruits of your labour ruined by somebody else. Sometimes it’s enough to make you want to turn your back on life and head for the closest hole. Such was the case with John Bigg from Dinton, Buckinghamshire, a hardworking clerk to Simon Mayne, one of the judges responsible for sentencing King Charles I to death in 1649. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 undoing all of his previous endeavours, Bigg spiralled into a depression and took to living in a nearby cave.

This reclusive lifestyle was only made possible due to the kindness of strangers. Bigg, previously a man of tolerable wealth, relied on the charity of the local people who provided him with food, drink and leather scraps. It is said that round his girdle hung three bottles, two of which held beer and the other milk.

He nailed these scraps to his clothes, the original material having long ago perished within the hostile cave air. One of his shoes can still be seen in the British Collection at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It is a bulky and cumbersome looking thing, the result of hundreds of separate pieces being nailed on top of one another, a constantly morphing reminder of almost forty years spent in isolation.

See John Bigg's shoes in Gallery 27, First Floor of the Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PH

Duncan Haskell is a writer living in Bristol. Having fallen through the cracks in the pavement, despite doing all he could as a child to avoid them, Duncan has been working his way back to the surface, writing down all he’s heard along the way.