Our precious island of biodiversity in the city
Discover the life that’s teeming in Brompton cemetery, thanks to the work of the Royal Parks and volunteers
This article was written for the Friends of Brompton Cemetery Magazine, Issue 84, Autumn 2025. If you’d like to pick up a print copy, just drop into the Visitor’s Centre (North Lodge, Old Brompton Road), or you can join the Friends of Brompton Cemetery for just £15 per year to get yours through the post (or by PDF for overseas members).
If you find precisely the right spot in Brompton Cemetery, you could easily convince yourself that you’re in the middle of the countryside. From this vantage point, you can see no buildings and the sounds of the city settle down into a distant hum. If you’re lucky, you might spot a goldfinch or, at the right time of day at the right time of year, catch a glimpse of a pipistrelle bat.
That peace and quiet, though, belies the cemetery’s thriving ecosystem, the life bustling between the mausoleums and gravestones. The last ecological survey, back in 2016, discovered just how much life there is — five species of bat, 221 species of moth and 40 different mosses. And eBird shows sightings of 46 species of bird.
The cemetery is not just an important heritage site, it’s a valuable habitat too.
For decades now, the received wisdom amongst environmentalists has been that small green spaces like Brompton cemetery aren’t particularly valuable for conservation. The assumption was that we needed to focus on big nature reserves. And whilst we do need to think about ecology at a landscape scale, recent studies have shown that small spaces are disproportionately important for biodiversity, especially within urban areas where they also improve air quality and reduce the heat island effect — they can be several degrees cooler than the surrounding city.
Parks might appear to be more important to wildlife than cemeteries which, with their pathways, gravestones, statues and mausoleums, feel like rather non-natural environments. But cemeteries are long-lasting green spaces which are generally protected from development and they can support a wide variety of habitat types leading to greater biodiversity than parks dominated by frequently-mown lawns, isolated trees and formal planting.
Brompton cemetery’s head gardener, Chris Moore, relies on “quite an elaborate vegetation management map” to help him maximise biodiversity whilst also serving visitors’ needs. Each section is treated slightly differently, giving visitors a variety of experiences and supporting the needs of different types of flora and fauna.
“The lime avenue, as you head north, is an area that we keep a bit neater,” he says, “then out towards the edges, it becomes a bit wilder. The east side, where Victorians leased a lot of graves in perpetuity, is where we tend to have a wilder aesthetic.” There, vegetation is cut less intensively, bramble stands “provide amazing shelter for birds” and, when they flower, pollen and nectar for insects. Burials continue on the west side and there, along with the area around the military graves, the lawn is neatly cut, looking more like a formal cemetery.
This variation means that Brompton features habitats that support every stage of ecological succession, starting with the grave tops themselves: made from all sorts of stones, they support 120 types of lichen.
Pioneer species such as oxeye daisies thrive in between the graves because there is less competition from grasses. In the wildflower meadows, grasses dominate, with some tussocky areas that are good for caterpillars, spiders and small mammals. Meanwhile, woodland edge environments provide shelter for birds, mammals and insects.
“If you take a habitat approach,” Chris says, “you realise that in a smallish site — it’s 40 acres — you can have a mosaic” of different habitats.
Chris and his team of four gardeners, along with seasonal contractors, are guided in their work by the Royal Parks biodiversity team, which suggests “specific host species to plant or ways to improve what we have. It’s a grey area between horticulture and conservation, and you can have quite a lot of fun with planting there in that zone.”
Brompton is still a working cemetery, but changing funerary practices are also helping biodiversity. Over 80% of funerals in the UK are now cremations, according to statistics from the Cremation Society. About half of Brompton’s burials are of cremated remains, with ashes either interred or scattered in the Garden of Remembrance, and the rest are full burials. The cemetery requests that all urns and coffins are biodegradable, reducing the ecological impact.
Emma Sparre-Newman, cemetery services and business development manager, explains: “Burials have essentially always been green. It is only more recently that metals and plastics have been used”, although she warns that some ‘eco-friendly’ coffins are actually made overseas or from materials harvested abroad, making them less environmentally friendly.
Alongside maintaining the cemetery as a funerary space, Chris aims to increase the diversity of trees and shrubs, and develop a stronger sense of visual impact.
“It’s really important when you’re trying to get people interested in nature, they need to notice it first. They need to engage with it. You could have an avenue of shrubs that flower all at the same time, or a display of summer flowering bulbs. There are very definite moments of the season, so there’s the cow parsley moment and when it’s happening, it’s glorious.”
Public engagement is essential, not only to illustrate the importance of the space for nature, but also to help visitors understand why the cemetery is managed the way that it is. Chris is assisted by the Friends of Brompton Cemetery, whose members lead tours to educate the public, but he worries that signage is limited to pointing out interesting trees or areas for wildlife. He’d like to see more engagement around the act of gardening and landscape conservation, and for the role of the gardeners to be more widely understood. “Some people think you just leave nature alone and it just gets on with it,” he says, but even the most unruly parts of the cemetery are that way by design.
There is a tension between the need to allow natural processes to take their course, particularly in autumn and winter, and the expectation that the space be kept neat and tidy. Chris thinks carefully about how to “frame the chaos”, so that people can instantly see that a scruffy area has been left that way deliberately.
“It could be a mown edge along a wilder area of long grass or, if we’re dealing with deadwood, then it’s stacking it in a deliberate way,” he says.
Deadwood, particularly standing deadwood, is a challenge for parks and cemeteries. Dead trees provide roosting places for bats, nesting opportunities for woodpeckers, and food for insects and fungi. But aesthetic concerns can lead to dead trees being cut down, so Chris is considering creative alternatives.
“Where trees have come down and the wood’s been left to rot down,” he says, “maybe we plant some flowering climbing plants [so that] you’ve retained that habitat, but you cloak it in flowers.”
Volunteers play an important part in the maintenance of the cemetery, helping out with bramble bashing, planting and raking meadows. The Friends have also recently begun to replace metal hoops around the storytelling area with a hazel fence, made with materials harvested from the Royal Parks themselves. Interventions like this help to make the cemetery feel more rural, more liminal, a magical space that’s both city and park, straddling the worlds of the living and the dead in a way that brings peace both to those who grieve and those who simply seek a little respite from urban life.