Category: Furniture
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Fantasy Coffins
Ga culture, in south-east Ghana, has a brilliant way of remembering the lives of those they’ve lost. Coffins in all kinds of shapes. Lions. Snakes. Chilli peppers. Aeroplanes. Coca cola bottles. For the Ga people, these stylish, personalised coffins are a rite of passage for anyone who dies in the local community. Ga, or fantasy…
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Strolls in the Brighton Extra Mural Cemetery
I was making full use of my recent membership of the British Library and delving into their archives to explore ye olde books on Cemeteries. I came across one such book that was written in the 1860’s for the Brighton Extra Mural Cemetery; imagine Bradshaw’s Guide, which was written as a timetable and guide to…
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The Wolf’s Water
by Sheldon ‘Pumps have their histories no less than rivers’ proclaims the York Herald in October 1875. ‘They have always yielded a good supply of fresh water, pleasant to drink, free from organic impurities, and notable for their brewing results, in the making of tea no less than in the making of beer.’ On the…
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The House Where Sambo Lived
by Sheldon From the outside, it looks like any other Victorian house you’d find in Kensington. Yellow London brick with windows framed in white-painted stone. Triumphant, smart and respectable. Yet look closer and a few things begin to highlight the uniqueness of the property. What’s that on the ground floor window, some kind of Fish…
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Early Victorian Coffins and Coffin Furniture
Today, I invited Twitter follower Sarah Hoile to contribute a post. Sarah has just completed the MA Artefact Studies at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL: her dissertation analysed ‘Coffin Furniture in London c.1700-1850: the establishment of tradition in the material culture of the grave’. Today she’s written about how our Victorian ancestors decked out their dead in their…
Cemetery Club 