Abney Park in Stoke Newington, in the London Borough of Hackney, is a historic parkland originally laid out in the early 18th century by Lady Mary Abney and Dr. Isaac Watts, and the neighbouring Hartopp family.

Image right - Gravestones in Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, London.

Image Geograph © Copyright Dave Pickersgill and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence.

In 1840 it became a non-denominational garden cemetery, a semi-public park arboretum, and an educational institute, which was widely celebrated as an example of its time. Abney Park is one of the Magnificent Seven London cemeteries. A total of 196,843 burials had taken place there as of the year 2000.

It is a Local Nature Reserve.

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Famous people: burials & associations

A

• Fred Albert - Music Hall actor

B

• George Linnaeus Banks (2 March 1821 – 3 May 1881), husband of author Isabella Banks, was a British journalist, editor, poet, playwright, amateur actor, orator, and Methodist.
• Isabella Varley Banks (25 March 1821 – 4 May 1897), also known as Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks or Isabella Varley, was a 19th-century writer of English poetry and novels, born in Manchester, England. She is most widely remembered today for her book The Manchester Man, published in 1876.
• Dr Thomas Binney, the 'Archbishop of Non-conformity', has a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery that shows him at the Anti-Slavery Society Convention (with Josiah Conder); Binney is buried close to the Church Street entrance in Abney Park Cemetery
• William and Catherine Booth, founders of The Salvation Army, are buried in a prominent location close to Church Street and next to their son Bramwell.
• Bramwell Booth - son of William and catherine Booth - founders of the Salvation Army
• Frederick Booth-Tucker, Salvation Army commissioner
• Frank Charles Bostock (1866 - 1912) Menagerist, circus owner. Zoo-keeper who ran a commercial menagerie. His memorial shows one of his finest specimens - a lion. (See his wife Susannah below) http://www.stereostokey.com/2009/02/frank-c-bostock-–-the-animal-king-of-abney-park-cemetery/
• Susanna Bostock is remembered, largely due to the dominance of her life-sized marble lion alongside a path close to the chapel. Along with the Wombwells, the Bostocks were mainly responsible for bringing Asian and African animals to the attention of the Victorian public. For part of the year giraffes lived close to the cemetery at a small farm in Yoakley Road.
• James Braidwood, Pioneering fire fighter credited with forming the first municipal fire brigade; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Braidwood_(fire_fighter)
• Rev. Dr. William Brock (1807–1875), was the first minister of Bloomsbury Chapel in Central London (1848–72);[2] abolitionist,[1], biographer, abolitionist and supporter of missionary causes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Brock_(pastor)
• Rev. Thomas Burchell, who narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Jamaican planters;
• Aaron Buzacott, the second Secretary of Anti-Slavery International, originally known as the Anti-Slavery Society.
• Sarah Buzacott, the wife of Aaron Buzacott the elder, who was a teacher at the London Missionary Society college at Rarotonga in the South Seas.

C

• Elijah Cadman, Salvation Army commissioner
• Betsi Cadwaladr, a Welsh nurse who worked in the Crimea with Florence Nightingale.
• Edward Calvert (20 September 1799 – 14 July 1883) was an English printmaker and painter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Calvert_(painter)
• Herbert Campbell (22 December 1844 – 19 July 1904) born Herbert Edward Story was an English comedian and actor who appeared in music hall, Victorian burlesques and musical comedies during the Victorian era. He was famous for starring, for forty years, in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane's annual Christmas pantomimes, predominantly as a dame.
• Thomas Caulker, the African, the son of the King of Bompey (now Sierra Leone), who signed an anti-slavery agreement that became part of an Act of Parliament in the 1850s;
• Rajendra Chandra Chandra, Professor of Calcutta Medical College and physician, is also buried here with his wife.
• Mary Chawner, wife of John Williams (English Missionary) and their son Rev Samuel Tamatoa Williams, - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Williams_(missionary)
• Albert Onesime Britannicus Gwathveoyd Louis Chevalier (21 March 1861 – 10 July 1923) was an English comedian and actor.
• Josiah Conder (1789-1855) Bookseller and Author, champion of Nonconformity, editor of The Patriot for 23 years.
• Joseph Corfield (1809-1888) who erected the Reformer's Memoprial in Kensal Green Cemetery - admirer of 19th C radical reformers
• Dan Crawley - Music hall actor

D

E

• Rev. William Ellis (1794–1872) was an English missionary and author. He traveled through the Society Islands, Hawaiian Islands and Madagascar, and wrote several books describing his experiences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ellis_(author)

F

• Dr Alexander Fletcher, (1787-1860) 'The Children's Friend'. - Non conformist divine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fletcher_(Rev.)
• John Freeman VC (1833 – 1 July 1913) was an English recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Freeman_(VC)
• The Rev. Joseph Jackson Fuller (1825–1908), Baptist missionary to the pre-colonial African Chiefdoms of the Cameroons, was one of the earliest slaves to be freed in Jamaica (initially under the partial freedoms of the "apprenticeship act") who went on to become well-educated and travel internationally. He headed mission stations, teaching, preaching, brick-making, and translating books such as John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress into Duala.

G

• Emily Gosse is buried in a simple grave near Dr Watts' Mound. Evangelist - see her husband - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Henry_Gosse

H

• Matthew Habersohn (1789-1852) English Architect who completed St. James' Cathedral, Jerusalem, in 1842.
• Rev. Dr. Christopher Newman Hall LLB (May 22, 1816 - February 18, 1902), born at Maidstone and known in later life as a 'Dissenter's Bishop', was one of the most celebrated nineteenth century English Nonconformist divines. Influential on the side of slavery emancipation in the American Civil War, is buried here with his father.
• John Vine Hall (1774-1860) Bookseller. He was an alcoholic who became a famous preacher and fathered 14 children.His biggest claim to fame was as the author of The Sinner's Friend 'the diary of John Vine Hall (1773-1860), a dissolute drunk who after many failed attempts to overcome his addictions wrote the "The Sinners Friend" - See more at: http://clanbarker.com/getperson.php?personID=I538&tree=Br#sthash.mH...
• John Harris (March 8, 1802 – December 21, 1856), English Congregational minister, Christian essayist and author, became the first Principal of New College, St John’s Wood, London.
• Rev. Nun Morgan Harry - 9th-century secretary of The Peace Society
• Mary Hays (1759 – 1843) was an English novelist and feminist.
• The Rev. John Hoppus LL.D., Ph.D., F.R.S. (1789–1875), was an English Congregational minister, author, Fellow of the Royal Society, abolitionist and educational reformer. He was appointed the first Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Mind at the newly formed London University (now University College, London), a position he secured and held against his formidable opponents from 1829 to 1866.
• T. Henry Howard, The Salvation Army's Chief of Staff.
• G W Hunt - actor

J

• Rev. John Jefferson - 19th Century secretary of The Peace Society

K

• Rev. Joseph Ketley, a Congregational missionary and abolitionist in Demerara
• Theodore Kitching, Salvation Army commissioner

L

• Walter Laburnum - Music Hall actor
• John Lawley, Salvation Army commissioner
• Leota, a native of the Samoa Islands whose life in London was due to the work of the London Missionary Society who sought to build schools and bring scripture to the inhabitants of the South Seas.
• George Leybourne (17 March 1842 to 15 September 1884) a Lion comique of the British Victorian Music Hall who, for much of his career, was known by the title of one of his songs, Champagne Charlie. Another of his songs, and one that can still be heard today, is The Flying Trapeze, or The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.

M

• Dr Walter Henry Medhurst - English Missionary
• Rev. Dr John Morison, patron of the escaped slave and influential African-American autobiographer Moses Roper.
• Samuel Morley - the philanthropist

O

• James Bronterre O'Brien (1805[1] – 23 December 1864) was an Irish Chartist leader, reformer and journalist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_%22Bronterre%22_O%27Brien
• John O'Connor Power (13 February 1846 – 21 February 1919) and his wife. He was an Irish Fenian and a Home Rule League and Irish Parliamentary Party politician and as MP in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland represented Mayo from June 1874 to 1885. He practised as a barrister from 1881. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O%27Connor_Power
• Rev. Samuel Oughton - who narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Jamaican planters
• Sir Hugh Owen, Founder of the University in Wales at Aberystwyth memorial is to the east of the Abney Park Cedar Circle.

P

• Nelly Power (10 April 1854 – 19 January 1887), was an English singer, actress and performer in music hall, burlesque and pantomime. Her funeral attracted three to four thousand spectators at Abney Park Cemetery and a further great crowd at the start of the procession from her home.
• The Rev Dr John Pye-Smith FRS, FGS (25 May 1774 - 5 February 1851) was a Congregational theologian and tutor, associated with reconciling geological sciences with the Bible, repealing the Corn Laws and abolishing slavery. He was the author of many learned works.

R

• George Scott Railton, The Salvation Army's first commissioner
• Sir Charles Reed FSA, buried close to Church Street - one of the cemetery's early Director and Trustees, one of the first two Members of Parliament for Hackney. Close by lies his father
• Dr Andrew Reed (1788–1862), a student of Rev. George Collison and founder of the London Orphan Asylum. In 1834, along with the Rev. J. Matheson, Andrew Reed was sent to the Congregational Churches of America by the Congregational Union of England and Wales as a deputation in order to promote peace and friendship between the two communities. He spent six months in America and during his stay there Yale University conferred upon him an honorary Doctorate of Divinity. This strengthened the Congregationalists' transatlantic links, ensuring the Rev George Collison's son a welcome when he visited to gain ideas for Abney Park cemetery's design from Mount Auburn Cemetery.
• Welsh MP Henry Richard, a mid-19th-century secretary of the Peace Society, instrumental in encouraging the first university in Wales at Aberystwyth along with its founder Sir Hugh Owen, whose own memorial is to the east of the Abney Park Cedar Circle.
• William Ridsdel, Salvation Army commissioner
• Thomas William Robertson (9 January 1829 – 3 February 1871), usually known professionally as T. W. Robertson, was an English dramatist and innovative stage director best known for a series of realistic or naturalistic plays produced in London in the 1860s that broke new ground and inspired playwrights such as W.S. Gilbert and George Bernard Shaw.
• Nathaniel Rogers M.D (1808–1884), was a doctor of medicine who qualified at Edinburgh University in 1832. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Rogers_(physician)

S

• Samuel Sharpe, the African, was a deacon at the Burchell Baptist church, who became a Jamaican hero
• Rev. James Sherman, who wrote the introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe's hugely influential Uncle Tom's Cabin. The novel was partly based on Josiah Henson, whose escape to freedom in Britain was assisted by the philanthropist Samuel Morley.
• Edward Stallybrass - English Missionary

T

U

V

• Joanna Vassa, daughter of Olaudah Equiano - well-known former slave who worked for abolition

W

• Eric Derwent Walrond (December 18, 1898 - August 8, 1966) was an African-American Harlem Renaissance writer and journalist, who made a lasting contribution to literature; his work remains in print today as a classic of its era. He was well-travelled, being born in Georgetown, Guyana (British Guiana) the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father, moving early in life to live in Barbados, and then Panama, New York, and eventually England.
• Dr.Isaac Watts (17 July 1674 – 25 November 1748) was an English hymnwriter, theologian and logician. A prolific and popular hymnwriter, he was recognised as the "Father of English Hymnody", credited with some 750 hymns. Many of his hymns remain in use today, and have been translated into many languages.
• Rev Samuel Tamatoa Williams, son of John Williams (English Missionary) and Mary Chawner (above)

First & Second World Wars

. Most of the space on the Abney Park Blitz memorial is taken up with the names of the victims of the 1940 Coronation Avenue incident (September 2005).

Abney Park contains war graves to 371 Commonwealth service personnel who died in the two World Wars and which are registered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission: 258 from World War I and 113 from World War II.

See the page at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website for a list of 375 records.

Stoke Newington has two 'Cross of Sacrifice' monuments constructed shortly after the end of WWI based on Blomfield's famous design: one on the lawn in front of St. Mary's Church on Church Street, and one in front of the south-facing facade of Abney Park Chapel in the cemetery. The names associated with the first cross are displayed a short distance away (inside the foyer of the public library on Church Street) whilst the names of those associated with the second cross (those who are interred in the cemetery but whose graves could not be given individual headstones) are recorded on a north-facing Screen Wall memorial added to the platform on which it stands. Near the cemetery cross, the names of Second World War servicemen who lost their lives and have been buried in the cemetery without separate commemoration, have also been displayed.