WALKIES IN THE PARADISE GARDEN
The Secret History of Pet Cemeteries with Julie-Marie Strange
Sunday 13th October from 3 pm

A final resting place for Wobbles, Dolly, Bogie, Maddie, Prince, Cupid and Butcha, the UK’s first pet cemetery opened in a corner of Hyde Park in 1880. A couple of decades later it was so overflowing with canine companions that it was declared full and deceased faithful friends were sent instead to a newly-opened pet cemetery in the leafy village of Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. By the mid 1920s this facility boasted over 600 pet graves and offered burial with full (animal) funeral rites.

Professor Strange’s talk explores the secret history of the UK’s earliest pet cemeteries to ask why, as burials for humans became more simplified after the death of Queen Victoria, did the pet cemetery flourish?

Tickets £12 including a delightful gin cocktail - Please click here to buy

Julie-Marie Strange
After spending far too much of her childhood in cemeteries and churchyards with her border collies, it was inevitable that Julie-Marie Strange would grow up obsessed by death and dogs. Among other things, she is the author of Death, Grief and Poverty, 1870-1914 (2005), co-author of The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain (2018) and is currently writing a book about pets and family life. She is Professor of Modern British History at Durham University.

The Venue - Brompton Cemetery