ABSTRACT
The cemetery landscape is built up through the commemorative activities of individual mourners who draw on traditional cultural aesthetics to reaffirm the personal identity and group membership of the deceased. The practices unique to each site can be classified into the following six stages: pre-mortem considerations, the death and delegation of the undertaking for burial, preparation of the corpse, the period of pre-burial mourning, interment and first-year post-burial mourning and its associated commemorative rites. At the City of London Cemetery, a calendar of memorial rites and practices of remembrance, all cemetery centred, mould the expression of loss in a newly created idiom of grave garden and stone. At Bushey United Jewish Cemetery, a distinct set of religious and cultural rites marks the passage of the body and soul and the parallel journey of the mourners during the first year of bereavement.
