In Place is an illustrative visual mapping of headstones found in London parks and former churchyards. In the 1850s, many of the city’s overcrowded graveyards were closed due to public health concerns, and burials were moved to new cemeteries on the outskirts. While the bodies were relocated, many headstones were left behind—gathered and stacked along churchyard walls or redistributed across the grounds. By the late nineteenth century, these disused burial spaces were transformed into public parks and playgrounds.
Today, headstones dating as far back as the 1750s still remain in these landscapes: embedded into walls, set into paving, or hidden beneath trees and overgrowth. Displaced from their original context, they no longer identify the individuals they once marked. Instead, they exist as fragmented datasets—clusters of memory that are simultaneously commemorative and detached. In some locations, they are arranged decoratively as relics of the past; in others, they lie neglected and almost unnoticed.
Through creating a collection of postal-style stamps and a mapped record of these sites, this project seeks to acknowledge their continued presence and re-inscribe these markers of memory into the contemporary urban landscape.
This project was made using a combination of digital and analogue tools. The postal stamps and maps design was done in Photoshop. To create a functional map, I used some help from ChatGPT to code it in p5.js and Cargo to host a website for the project.
