London’s Pocket Parks: St Thomas’s Long Burial Ground, E9

This is a very long narrow pocket park in Hackney that seems at first glance to live up to its name — a former burial ground that’s now a public park.

But there’s a problem — it’s got the wrong name. Not the long bit, because it’s very long, and as you can see, graves are dotted around — it’s very much a former burial ground. No, it’s the St Thomas bit — it’s named after the wrong saint.

The burial ground was first laid out in 1810 as a cemetery for a chapel of ease built here as a southern overflow for St John-at-Hackney Church. The chapel, which could hold 750 people, was constructed on Well Street, with the burial ground behind it. However, it didn’t last long, as the area’s growing population saw the parishes chopped around quite often to accommodate new churches. The chapel was renamed St John’s Church in 1848 but demolished in 1880 to be replaced with the smaller St Andrew’s mission church.

The chapel was demolished around 1942, and the land was added to the burial ground, which by then was a public park.

So far, there is no St Thomas in sight.

Back to the pocket park though. Burials had continued until 1876, and on 22nd December 1884, the Consistory Court of London approved Hackney Board of Works’ proposal to turn the burial grounds into a public park. The conditions were that headstones would be cleared to the edges of the recreation ground park, leaving the principal tablestones in place.

The park opened in October 1885.

However, it was soon neglected and turned into a dumping ground. In 1900, there were complaints that the park was now a dunghill and dustheap and that the local vestry needed to do something about it.

It also turned out that a former Public Gardens and Open Spaces Committee chairman had allowed greenhouses and vegetable patches to be erected in the public park space. That chairman, Mr Kyffin was described in December 1900 as having been evicted from his “reign” in 1898, but it was taking time to undo the damage he had permitted.

Today, the park is rather cleaner and enriched by the long row of Victorian terraced houses on the western side. A narrow passageway separates the houses from the park. Originally Barrister Lane, it was later renamed St Thomas’s Place after the housing was built here.

The other side of the long park used to be the backs of gardens, but post-war clearance saw all those houses demolished and replaced with the blocks of flats there today.

It’s quite a long, fairly plain space, interspersed with London Plane trees and a handful of the surviving graves. The park’s northern half also has a hedge planted around the edges. Apart from the free-standing graves, it seems that the gravestones originally piled up around the edges were removed at some point, which is a shame as it reduces the space’s history.

There also seems to be a pigeon problem, with several signs asking people not to feed the birds.

The name remains a mystery — it seems likely to have been adopted from nearby St Thomas’s Square, one of Hackney’s oldest open spaces.

So, a burial ground that spent its entire life associated with St John and St Andrew was opened as a public park named after St Thomas.