Wandering Lines and Cul-de-sacs: Trajectories of Ashes in the United Kingdom

Cremation was introduced in the United Kingdom in the 1870s and legalised in the 1902 Cremation Act (Jalland, 1999). Its uptake was slow however and only overtook burial in 1968. By 1995, just over 70 per cent of all disposals in the United Kingdom were cremations, the rate then remaining at this level (Davies and Mates, 2005). As a result of this relatively low initial uptake, local councils were unwilling to invest in new sites for crematoria, instead using existing cemetery land. In addition, their location in existing cemeteries was seen to ‘mitigate the “strangeness” of this new form of disposal by offering its provision in a familiar context’ (Rugg, 2006: 217). While the siting of crematoria subsequently became more diverse, cremation and the disposal of ashes usually occurred in the same landscape: the crematorium and its surrounding gardens. Thus in the 1970s only 12 per cent of ashes were removed from crematoria by family or friends for disposal elsewhere (Davies and Guest, 1999).