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This is actually kind of beautifulView attachment 3551973
One of most striking sites alongside London’s St. Pancras Old Church cemetery is the Hardy Tree, an ash tree surrounded by hundreds of weathered gravestones. In the 1860s, Britain’s rail system was experiencing immense growth, and London was outgrowing its existing lines. In order to accommodate the growing population of commuters, an expansion was planned—directly affecting the graveyard at St. Pancras.
In order to make way for the new train line, an architecture firm was contracted to perform the sensitive task of exhuming the remains and reburying them at another site. The job was promptly assigned to their young employee Thomas Hardy who in the following decades would publish many classic novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
After the essential duty was completed, there remained hundreds of headstones, along with the question of what to do with them. Hardy’s solution was to place them in a circular pattern around an ash tree in the churchyard in a spot that would not be disturbed by the railway.
Over the years the tree has absorbed many of the headstones, life and death slowly combining over centuries.