Early Days

The story of Horton Cemetery begins not at Horton, but at Epsom’s own cemetery in Ashley Road.

Epsom had opened its new municipal cemetery there in 1871, replacing the ancient parish burial ground at St Martin’s Church. As the town’s population grew, space in the old churchyard had become increasingly limited.

The new cemetery was something of which Epsom’s councillors could be proud. Behind its wrought-iron entrance gates stood a porter’s lodge and two chapels – one for the Church of England and another for Nonconformists.

Then, twenty-five years later, something happened that would transform Epsom.

In 1896, the London County Council purchased the Horton Manor estate. Over the following decades it would construct five enormous psychiatric institutions there, eventually accommodating thousands of patients sent principally from London.

That presented Epsom with an uncomfortable practical question:

where would those patients be buried when they died?

Epsom did not want London’s dead

At first, some patients who died were buried in Epsom’s municipal cemetery at Ashley Road.

During the winter of 1898, Epsom’s councillors permitted a small number of burials on the uphill side of the cemetery, away from its main gates. The London County Council was charged the normal fee for the burial of someone from outside the town: £1 for each burial.

But this was not a solution Epsom was prepared to accept indefinitely.

The language used at the time also reveals the attitudes surrounding the people being sent to the new institutions.

In the terminology of the period, many were regarded as “pauper lunatics” – people whose care was paid for from public funds and who occupied a deeply stigmatised position in Victorian society.

Epsom’s councillors did not want their carefully created municipal cemetery overwhelmed by burials from London’s new asylum estate.

Their message to the London County Council’s Asylums Committee was firm:

the asylum authorities would have to provide a cemetery of their own.

That decision ultimately created Horton Cemetery.

Finding somewhere to bury the patients

In the spring of 1899, the London County Council’s Asylums Engineer came to Epsom to identify a suitable site.

Land was selected near the junction of Horton Lane and Hook Road, separated from the main hospital buildings that were beginning to appear across the Horton estate.

But the chosen ground presented difficulties almost immediately.

Beneath it lay the heavy Horton clay.

When trial holes were dug, water appeared rapidly. The Borough Surveyor and Medical Officer consequently required the cemetery to be drained below grave level, with the water carried away to a holding pond on the opposite side of Horton Lane.

It was an important practical consideration. This was not intended to be a small burial ground used occasionally. The London County Council knew that the developing asylum estate would eventually accommodate thousands of people.

The cemetery was not consecrated, enabling people of different Christian denominations – and those without a denominational burial – to be interred within the same ground.

Iron railings enclosed the site. Trees were planted and paths laid out.

A small prefabricated corrugated-iron chapel – the cemetery’s “tin chapel” – was erected at a cost of £254.

By May 1900, the LCC’s Asylums Engineer could report that the cemetery had been drained, laid out and fenced and that its chapel had been completed.

Yet people were already being buried there.

Before the cemetery was finished

The first person presently known to have been buried at Horton Cemetery was Annie James.

She was a patient at the Manor and was buried on 31 July 1899, aged 47.

Her burial therefore took place while work on the cemetery was apparently still continuing.

She would be the first of thousands.

The original cemetery was planned with approximately 900 burials, arranged in rows on either side of a central path.

It seemed a substantial provision.

It would prove nowhere near enough.

As the Manor was joined by Horton Asylum, the Ewell Epileptic Colony, Long Grove and finally West Park, the population of the Epsom Cluster grew into the thousands.

So too did its dead.

Over the following 56 years, the little cemetery created because Epsom did not want London’s asylum patients buried at Ashley Road would become the final resting place of around 9,000 people.

And that early dispute tells us something important about their story.

The separation of these people did not necessarily end when they died.

The institutions had kept them apart from wider society in life. Horton Cemetery would keep many of them apart in death.