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| The Pyramid of Cheops (or the Great Pyramid of Giza as it is better known) in the ‘Description de l'Égypte’ |
One
of the consequences of Napoleon’s invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1798 was a
wave of Egyptomania sweeping across Europe during the first two decades of the
19th century. Alongside his 40,000 troops Bonaparte took 167
savants with him to the land of the Pharaohs; engineers and artists,
geologists, chemists, and mathematicians as well as philologists and
antiquarians, who collectively formed the Institut
d'Égypte, dedicated to studying the cradle of civilisation, Ancient
Egypt. Back in France, from 1809 until
1829, the Institut painstakingly
produced and published under Napoleon’s patronage the nine folios of text and
ten volumes of plates of the monumental ‘Description de l'Égypte’, fuelling the
craze for all things Egyptian. In architecture the Egyptian revival look poised,
for a while at least, to challenge the hegemony of neo-classicism. Gothic
revival may have eventually became the prevailing taste of the Victorian age
but the architecture of the Egyptian revival, with its fascination for mortuary
culture, found its niche in the newly formed garden cemeteries of England’s
major cities.
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| Sir Frederick Trench's proposed pyramid to commemorate victory against Napoleon. |
Some
of the greatest monuments of the Egyptian revival never made it beyond the
planning stage. In 1815 a veteran of the Napoleonic wars, Sir Frederick William
Trench MP, proposed building a pyramid to commemorate victory over the French. His suggestion was for a 380 foot tall, 22
step ziggurat (one step for each year of the war and taller than St Paul’s) to
be sited at the top end of Pall Mall where Trafalgar Square now stands. Sir
Frederick’s pyramid scheme would, he calculated, provide employment for
demobilised British troops for at least 10 years at a cost of just £1 million
to the British taxpayer. No one took the proposal for a giant pyramid seriously
and Sir Frederick eventually gave up on the idea, instead throwing his time and
energy into pursuing a scheme to build a giant quay along the north bank of the
Thames. But something about Pyramids appealed to the Zeitgeist and in the
architect Thomas Willson’s proposal for the metropolitan sepulchre on Primrose
Hill, a gigantic pyramid to be built to store up to five million corpses, it also
happened to dovetail with the heated contemporary debate about what to do about
London’s overcrowded and noxious churchyards. The 1828 edition of The London Literary Gazette and Journal of
Belles Lettres, Arts, & Sciences dubbed Willson’s proposal the ‘pyramid
of death’:
Another
remarkable design is “the project of a pyramidal metropolitan sepulchre By
Thomas Willson Architect. The edifice is to consist of brick work to be faced
with square blocks of granite. The base of it would, according to the project,
occupy an area of 40 acres (about as large as Russell Square) the length of the
ground line being 1200 feet. The height of it is intended to be 1500 feet,
(nearly four times the height of St Paul's). The projector has published a
prospectus of the work, which will be found annexed to the painting exhibited
in the gallery”. This monstrous piece of folly, the object of which is to have
generations rotting in one vast pyramid of Death, instead of being quietly
mingled with their parent earth and forgotten, is perhaps the most ridiculous
of the schemes broached in our scheming age. The desire to accomplish that which
every wise and philosophical mind must wish not to have accomplished is indeed
worthy of a professor of that art or science Architecture, which is at so low
an ebb in this country, as to stand at the bottom of the whole list.
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| Willson's blueprint for the Metropolitan Sepulchre |
Willson’s
proposal required no public funding; it was in fact ‘practical, economical and
remunerative’ and would, he believed cost, £2,583,552 to build but make a
profit of £10,764,800 once the sepulchre was completely filled (which he
estimated would take about 125 years, at a rate of 40,000 interments a year).
Freehold vaults, “which are to closed up and sealed for ever when interment
lakes place, with stone tablets on the face, explanatory of name, place, age,
&c.”, were to cost between £100 and £500, depending on the size and location,
and there would be a steady income stream from vaults leased to the various
parishes of London. The gigantic structure would hold 215,219 vaults on 94
stories, accessed by sloping ramps and hydraulic powered lifts and would cover
18 acres of Primrose Hill but hold as many bodies as a 1000 acre cemetery. His clever design would, Willson wrote “go
far towards completing the glory of London.” It isn’t clear if the 1500 foot
height of the Metropolitan Sepulchre included the 200 feet elevation of Primrose
Hill or not. Either way the brooding bulk of the Sepulchre, at almost 460
metres tall, would have dominated the London skyline; the obelisk at the summit
of the pyramid would have been at twice the height of Canary Wharf and 250
metres higher than the Shard. Being almost as wide at the base at it was tall
it would have hung over the capital like a manmade mountain, blocking out
sunlight for long periods of the day to huge swathes of north London. One of
the main concerns about the scheme was that the weight of the millions of tons
of bricks and granite used would crush Primrose Hill.
Willson
first proposed his scheme in 1824 when it caught the attention of barrister George
Frederick Carden, the garden cemetery pioneer, who was beginning to take an interest
in burial reform. Carden was intrigued
but not convinced and Willson was enrolled into the burgeoning burial reform
movement. He became one of the early
members of Carden’s General Cemetery Company and attended the historic meetings
held in the Freemason’s Tavern in June and July 1830, chaired by Andrew
Spottiswoode MP. After Carden had opened the meeting by outlining his vision
for a London garden cemetery along the lines of Père Lachaise, open to all
denominations and all religions, Willson was the first person to respond.
According to the Oxford Journal of 10 July 1830, “Mr. Wilson (sic) coincided
generally in the sentiments expressed by the last speaker, but he did not think
the plan of Pere-la-Chaise suitable for a general cemetery in this country. He
had a plan by which he should be able to make 50 or 100 acres of land as
available for the purpose of burial as 1,000 could be by any other method.”
Perhaps
spurred on by the momentum around the General Cemetery Company Willson published
his plans in 1830 under the title “The Pyramid, a general metropolitan cemetery
to be erected in the vicinity of Primrose Hill” including drawings of his
proposed designs. The publication
attracted the attention of another notable figure in the burgeoning cemetery
movement, John Claudius Loudon, whose correspondence with the Editor of the
Morning Advertiser was published in the newspaper on 19 January 1830. As with
other members of the cemetery movement, Loudon applauded Willson’s desire to
abolish burials in churchyards but objected to the pyramid proposal “first,
because I think the risk of mephitic exhalations would be greatly increased;
secondly, because the expenses of burial of the poor would be greatly increased
by such agglomeration of corruption; and, thirdly, and in this perhaps I am
peculiar, because I hate the idea of interment in a vault, or in any way which
prevents the body from speedily returning to its primitive elements, and
becoming useful by entering into new combinations—vegetable, mineral, or even
animal, in aquatic burial.” He also had an geometrical objection to the
proposed form of the metropolitan sepulchre; “a pyramid recalls to me an age of
darkness and superstition; and not being guilty of what Mr. Bentham calls,
ancestor worship, and thinking that in this country there is by far too great a
veneration for antiquity in things mental as well material, I prefer looking
forward.” After encouraging Willson to “push his scheme as far it will go, by
which, at least, public attention will be called to the subject,” he went on to
make an alternative proposal, a garden cemetery, to be built on 500 acres of
the cheapest land available within a 50 mile radius of London, somewhere like
Bagshot Heath he suggests. That the dead be conveyed there by public hearse
which “ought to leave London every other day, at a certain hour” though “a
rail-road and steam loco-motive engine might in time be employed in this
business, for poorer classes —and the rich, or those who ride when alive in
private carriages, might bury by private hearses.” This sounds remarkably prescient
of Brookwood Cemetery, which is a mere 6 or 7 miles from Bagshot Heath.
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| Laura Haines recreation of the Sepulchre as it would look on today's London skyline |
Willson
assiduously followed Loudon’s suggestion to ‘push his scheme as far as it would
go’ as we will see later, but despite 30 years of unstinting effort on his part
and the lure of the potential millions to be made in burial fees no one really
took the Metropolitan Sepulchre proposal seriously. In time memory of the
scheme survived only as a paragraph in scholarly histories of the burial reform
movement and as footnotes in accounts of the architecture of the English
Egyptian Revival. But in the last six or seven years interest in the ‘pyramid
of death’ has revived and dozens of websites have given posting space to an
account based very heavily on the London Literary Gazette article of 1828 and
it frequently features in lists such as ‘The landmark buildings that never were’ (BBC News 24 Jul 2012) and ‘The TopTen: Unrealised and unfinished buildings’ (The Independent 09 May 2015). The
graphic artist Laura Haines completed her project ‘Metropolitan Sepulchre: ACounterfactual History of London’ in 2016, imagining what Willson’s pyramid
would be like today if it had actually been built; the answer, of course, is
that it would be a tourist attraction.
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| Laura Haines again - this time recreating the Sepulchre during the blitz. |
In
2012 Radio 4 broadcast ‘A Pyramid For Primrose Hill’, Jonathan Glancey’s look
at the Metropolitan sepulchre, the Egyptian Revival and the cemetery movement
(still available on BBC iplayer). One of Glancey’s interviewees was Ralph Hyde former librarian
of the Guildhall Library. As they leaf through a copy of Willson’s plans
Glancey asks do we know much about Thomas Willson? “Not very much,” says Hyde,
“he was born about 1780, and he went to the Royal Academy schools, and he was
given some prizes, so he started off as a serious architect by the sound of it.
He did various schemes for national monuments, victory monuments, but none of
them seem to have been built. But in the 1820's he came up with this idea for a
pyramid for London….” And there, in less than a hundred words, we have the sum
total of virtually all the biographical data available on Willson. No one
seemed to know anything about him; his pyramid may be one of London’s favourite
unbuilt buildings but the man himself was a total mystery. I could not believe
that anyone in the public eye for an outré proposition like the Metropolitan
Sepulchre could really leave no trace in the records. There had to be
something, somewhere. And so I started to work through birth, death and marriage
records, census returns, newspaper archives and even the records of the Cape
Colony in South Africa and eventually started to piece together a
biographical outline of the man who would be Cheops.
See also posts on Willson's adventures in South Africa in Part Two and his later years in Part Three
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