Cemetery Archives: Willesden New Cemetery

Willesden New is a tricky place to find: if you're visiting, take a map, because it's hidden in the back streets of north-west London behind Homebase and a large building site. If you're using public transport, the nearest tube is Dollis Hill; don't try to get there from Willesden, or you'll have a very long walk. Don't trust the map too much either; Willesden New is shown as all of a piece with the Jewish cemetery next door. Though they share a wall, there's no ingress from one to the other.

Someone will get offended by me saying this, but they're really packing them in at Willesden New. The newest graves are right by the entrance gates, something of a giveaway that space is running out, and one of the main paths has also been filled up with burials; Brian Parsons likened this to "a marble traffic-jam", and he's not wrong. The majority of the monuments are unremarkable. Two really stand out: the statue of Georgie Robinson, killed in a car accident on her honeymoon; and the monoliths on the grave of Ernest Schwartz "of the Kalahari", who apparently designed a scheme to irrigate that desert.