Back to East London... (Part One)

Back in September, five of us travelled to East London to have a look at some of the places where The Salvation Army began. As we were also trying to visit all the places on the Monopoly Board on the same day, we ran out of time slightly, and there were a couple of Army places we didn’t quite get round to seeing. Today I was in London with Patrick and we decided to go and see the last few places (At our Salvation Army church there’s a chance I might be leading a little tour around London to see some of these places, so I thought I should at least know where they are).

Our first stop was Stoke Newington (which isn’t really East London after all - or is it? Matt?). We were going to find Abney Park Cemetery, a place both of us have heard about and seen pictures of, but never visited. This was the final resting place of William Booth, his wife Catherine, and a number of other Salvation Army greats. We’d seen fantastic pictures of Booth’s funeral procession to the cemetery, such as this:
(Click here to see the full photo – and do, because it’s good.)

But we had heard that the cemetery had since fallen into disrepair. Wikipedia puts it nicely: ‘Nature has been allowed to take its course’. We saw the entrance to the cemetery and I recognised it immediately, although it looks a little different now: We took our chances and went in.

It’s an absolute maze. Every few steps the paths fork and we really had no idea where to find the Salvationist graves. We did a lot of walking around (and asking ourselves why we had come to a cemetery on a Saturday afternoon).Bike man clearly wanted to be in the photo.

But then we (I say ‘we’, but it was actually Patrick) found them (and very nicely kept they were too!):
As it turns out, if we’d gone left at the entrance and not right, we would have found them a lot sooner!

As we left, we saw the map of the cemetery with the Booths’ graves clearly marked. D’oh.