One month ago, on the 191st anniversary of his death, William Blake got a new gravestone.
How amateur sleuths finally tracked down the burial place of William Blake .
Bunhill Fields was a cemetery popular with Dissenters, and when Blake died, largely unrecognised, in 1827, his was the fifth of eight coffins to be buried in the plot. …But after bomb damage during the second world war, the Corporation of London decided to transform part of the site into gardens, leaving only two remaining gravestones, and moving Blake’s stone next to a memorial to an obelisk commemorating Daniel Defoe.
The burial records were not always precise, according to Carol Garrido, whose skills as a landscape architect were vital. “You could see the handwriting in the burial order book change,” she said. “We imagined someone who was a clerk in the office, writing what the foreman of the gravediggers told them.” By using the two existing graves to find a point of origin, after two years they had found the right place.
Iron Maiden frontman joins hundreds at unveiling of William Blake gravestone
An attendee’s video of the event, positioned to the actual unveiling. APOCALYPSE The Unveiling of a Gravestone to William Blake. - YouTube
Ludovic
September 13, 2018, 10:39am
2
Nice! I stumbled on his pseudo-grave last year (I meant to go to the cemetery but did not know it had Blake and Bunyan amongst others). It looks like there was some whitewashing going on since the plaque near his former grave said something like “his actual grave is here somewhere, but we’re not quite sure where, but whatareyagonnado?” without giving the reason for the uncertainty.