Take a train out of any town in Britain, and before long you will pass a number of small churchyards and Victorian cemeteries: angelic, sepulchral, the headstones tilting any which way, the interiors thick with buddleia and mournfulness. In contrast, the cemeteries of the modern era are bleak, flat fields with serried rows of nondescript gravestones looking like an abandoned game of patience, with all the spiritual uplift of a supermarket car park. This is what we have done with death, these places seem to say: rid it of all its terror and replaced it with banality. It was not always this way.
The burial of the dead has not only given rise to architecture, but to some profound transformations of the human landscape. Cemeteries have also provided us with insights into past cultures, belief systems and genealogies. Most of what we know about the past, the Spanish architect Pedro Azara has written, comes out of the ground. This may not be true for much longer. The rapid rise of cremation in the second half of the 20th century has prompted two sociologists, Douglas Davies and Alastair Shaw, to describe crematoria "as centres where social identities were annihilated." Furthermore, we are now witnessing the growing popularity of "natural burial," designed to leave no historical trace in the landscape whatsoever. According to Stephanie Wienrich at the Natural Death Centre, there are now some 160 woodland burial sites in Britain, starting from just one site in 1993 in Carlisle: even advocates of natural burial are surprised at the growth of this form of interment. While there are many merits to both cremation and ecological burial, the long-term effects of both are far-reaching and irrevocable.
In modern times, the disposal of the dead has become a technical rather than a teleological issue, yet this goes against the grain of history. The opening of P?re Lachaise at the beginning of the 19th century announced the beginning of a new culture of death in the west. It was of a piece with the ideals of the Enlightenment and French republicanism, designed to rid death of its morbid and religious terrors. In the 20th century, Stockholm's Woodland cemetery pioneered an equally radical means of coming to terms with death in a modern, democratic society. Its sweeping lawns, grassy mounds and hilltop groves, wide open to the sky, drew attention away from the solitary grave, while the irregular scattering of graves in beautiful woodland meant that it was the collective experience of the forest and landscape which shaped people's emotions. The architectural historian Marc Treib recently described the Stockholm Woodland cemetery as "the most perfect and profound modern landscape on the planet."
Both of these were strikingly original models of landscape and architectural design, perfectly tuned to the political register of their times and settings. Both set the standard for the century ahead, and their influence stretched across much of the globe.
Today, the unifying cultural role of the cemetery in the west is no longer assured. Cremation has largely seen to that, although other changes have also contributed. There are, crudely, three ways in which you can dispose of your loved ones and fellow citizens: burn them, bury them or build them a place of their own. All present ethical and cultural challenges to society and its sense of its own identity and history. Consider the statistics of cremation first.
There are clear patterns and surprising anomalies. The continued, although weakening, opposition to cremation by the Catholic church explains the rather low rates in Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal and France. Yet the great differences amongst the Scandinavian countries are not so easily explained, neither are the differences between ex-communist countries such as the Czech Republic and Hungary. Similarly, why do Austria, Belgium and to a lesser extent, the Netherlands, continue with low rates of cremation compared with other equally secular societies such as the Czech Republic, Denmark, Britain, Switzerland and Sweden? It is clear that more than religion is involved, as the low cremation rate in the US (another modern, Protestant culture), suggests.
There is little research which explains such dramatic differences amongst otherwise similar cultures. My own - simplistic - reading of the situation is as follows: most northern Europeans are comfortable with cremation and any kind of burial, but find the re-use of graves unacceptable, and resist inhumation in vaults above ground; southern Europeans are more resistant to cremation but are content with most kinds of burial, above or below ground, and are relaxed about the re-use of graves, even after just ten years; Americans are generally unhappy about cremation, prefer burial (because resurrectionary beliefs remain strong), but find the re-use of graves and the idea of "natural burial" unacceptable.
Cremation has had an inhibiting effect on the architecture of the cemetery and, therefore, on the public culture ascribed to death and memory. It is extraordinary that, given the proliferation of crematoria buildings and associated gardens of remembrance in the 20th century, almost nothing has been published about their architecture, landscaping and overall aesthetic design. One rare critic, James Stevens Curl, is adamant that "Most crematoria in Britain are distressingly banal and poorly designed, and are composed of disparate elements that are uncomfortably resolved." The buildings fail to convey anything of the mystery or ritual of death, and they rarely integrate indoor and outdoor spaces and processionals. They may be pretty, but they are rarely profound.
But this should not be surprising. Without a body to provide the focal point around which the grave, the tomb or the final resting place of the remains is designed and articulated, there is nothing else to do but retreat to a kind of polite formalism. Hence the neatly ordered rose gardens of remembrance, the precise rows of columbaria, and the modest cremation chapels, none of which seems capable of possessing the moral power of the grave or tomb, let alone the monumental landscaped cemetery.
It seems to have proved impossible for architects to respond meaningfully to cremation, and those who choose cremation doubtless prefer it this way: the reduction of a human body to ash is clearly based on an anti-monumentalist impulse. For most of history, however, it has been the measure and shape of the human body - from the "Vitruvian Man" of Leonardo da Vinci to the 6ft London policeman around which Le Corbusier's modular system was based - which has provided the fundamental architectural scale.
In Mediterranean Europe and certain parts of north America where above-ground inhumation - in mausolea, wall tombs and vaults - is accepted, this problem arises less. Indeed, there have been attempts to create a new vocabulary and style for the monumental cemetery, with the creation of large, formal buildings for the dead. Aldo Rossi's "tower blocks for the dead" at San Cataldo in northern Italy constitute the most influential work in this new era of formalism. More recently, the Spanish architect, C?sar Portela, has designed a spectacular cemetery at Finisterre ("end of the earth") in Galicia, Spain. Sited on a promontory jutting into the Atlantic, Portela has designed a series of granite cubes - set at random angles to each other - overlooking the sea, each cube containing 12 burial niches. These face the Atlantic in an embattled defiance of human mutability, or the processes of natural erosion.
At the other end of the spectrum, the growing preference for natural burial is not only anti-architectural, but resists the long tradition of formal landscaping too. Advocates of natural burial seek to create cemeteries which meld into the uncultivated landscape as quickly as possible, returning to a "state of nature" as if the human presence on earth had never been. This is a presumption of astonishing radicalism, since for the past 2,000 years one of the main functions of burial and funerary ritual - from the inscriptions and epitaphs in the Roman catacombs to the cult of the headstone from the 18th century onwards - has been to leave for posterity a record of each life lived. Natural burial denies this function, at least with regard to any kind of design or inscription at the place of interment.
This desire to "be at one with nature" and to leave no record behind is an unexpected and late-modern phenomenon, at least within western culture. It seems to be part of a new kind of ecological consciousness, rather than a trace element of pre-historic or pagan belief systems. It may be that many older people who have survived until the end of the 20th century now feel that there has been too much history in their lives, and that some kind of reconciliation with nature is more important than adding to the heavy workload of the angel of history.
A fine example of one of the newest woodland burial settings in Britain can be found at Colney wood, near Norwich, opened in 2000. The site is set in 12 acres of mature woodland. Neither stone nor rare hardwood memorials are allowed, and everything involved in the interment must be biodegradable. The burial plots are given on a lease which ends in 2099, at which point the whole site reverts to natural woodland, held under the protection of a trust. Services can be held in accordance with any religion, or none, and the cemetery is part of a publicly accessible landscape. The point is that the grave can revert to the natural habitat of the woodland as soon as possible. This return to nature is often specifically mentioned as being the ultimate desire. The words on one small wooden marker on the grave of an 85-year-old man, read: "In this green quiet place/I give myself to peace and rest."
Colney wood is not in the least frightening or morbid. The woodland itself, after decades of neglect, seems exquisitely structured, with light breaking through the tree canopy on to the paths and undergrowth in cathedral - like slants and golden rays. The hilly terrain allows for a meandering network of paths through the forest, with occasional, and spectacular, outlooks from the escarpment through the trees on to the lakes and other distant vistas.
While none of us will be around to complain afterwards about having made a bad choice, or having ended up on the wrong side of the tracks (or ring road), it is important to remember that cemeteries are designed for the living, not the dead. We make these places to assuage our fears and apprehensions, to calm and ameliorate our sense of loss and grief. In the 20th century we have not made a good job of it. In Britain, it is wrapped up in the problem of the decline of civic culture (and forms of financing). In the US, as was shown by last year's dreadful Tri-State Crematory story - where more than 300 bodies due for cremation were left lying to rot in open woodland and outhouses, or piled into shallow pits, because of a faulty incinerator - funerary culture reflects the surrounding market economy: the rich get exclusive properties in private mausolea, the poor get a cheap burial or cremation on welfare, with little regulation or dignity.
There is a myth that death has replaced sex as a taboo subject for polite society. Not so: bookshops and libraries are full of books on coping with terminal illness, on bereavement and grief. We have become more adult, thoughtful and rational about the mystery and pain of death. It is, rather, in the public face of death that modern culture is found wanting, in the utilitarian bleakness of the modern cemetery, the over-manicured fastidiousness of crematorium buildings and gardens, as well as the abandoned and vandalised cemeteries of the past. Perhaps this is the most telling example of our loss of faith in a civic culture, a culture that once dignified people in death, as well as keeping the streets clean.
