Lessons from Crossbones Graveyard : a more-than-individuated ethics of care for place, community and ecology

Reeves, Hannah Victoria (2025) Lessons from Crossbones Graveyard : a more-than-individuated ethics of care for place, community and ecology. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis explores a significant moment in the recent history of Crossbones Graveyard, a post-medieval burial site close to London Bridge. Initially redeveloped after its closure in 1853, the burial ground has now been reclaimed by local residents as a ‘wild’ garden for ‘the Outcast dead.’ Having existed on ‘meanwhile’ leases under the stewardship of a local charity since 2015, the project will soon enter into a 30-year lease to establish a longer-term memorial on site, with a corporate property developer as its landlord. In this new context, is it possible to retain the radical ethos that has shaped the garden and community at Crossbones? Which Crossbones are ‘we’ fighting for and what does it mean to lose or keep it? Who and what is part of this more-than-human ‘we’ and how are we differentially imbricated in the burial ground’s protection? This context frames the scope and urgency of this thesis, which explores the material-ecological (nature)culture of the burial ground as an archive that is slipping away. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Crossbones offers and demands a ‘more-than-individuated’ (Kaishian & Djoulakian, 2020) framework to consider how practices of care, making-kin and memory-making bind together bodies across human/nonhuman and living/dead distinctions.

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