A quick visit to Kensal Green Cemetery

The weather has definitely turned here in London. The past week has seen a drop in temperatures, and the rain has certainly made itself known. I have tucked my Brompton Electric up for the winter, and it will not be getting another outing until around. March. My G-Line will almost certainly feature heavily in my Brompton rotation, as I regard it as the most excellent of poor-weather bicycles. One journey I took it on recently was to an old haunt of mine, Kensal Green Cemetery.

Kensal Green Cemetery is somewhere I have visited countless times over the years. It is one of London's ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries, and despite being rather fond of its neighbour Highgate, about half an hour away on a Brompton, Kensal Green is where my strongest affections lie.

I used to pay a visit to the cemetery four or five times a year, but since both my parents had their funerals at Kensal Green over ten years ago, I now visit more frequently, perhaps once a month. There are so many famous names, characters and stories that you could spend years finding out about them all.

These days, I usually cycle there, which is always an interesting ride. However, I do remember when I was much younger, walking there during the school holidays with a friend who lived nearby. We would pass all the locations in Notting Hill and the surrounding area that today's awful influencers visit for all of two minutes to take a photo or video of themselves posing, eating something or doing something so cringe-worthy that they should be taken away to the not-too-distant HMP Wormwood Scrubs! Once we had paid our visit, we would either walk back or catch a number 52 bus back to SW7.

The Orange household was in Greenwich recently, and at the National Maritime Museum there were quite a few displays about Admiral Lord Nelson. It struck me that I was sure Sir William Beatty, the surgeon who served in the Royal Navy, was buried at Kensal Green.

Beatty was the ship's surgeon aboard HMS Victory and witnessed the death of Nelson. He wrote his ‘Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson’ which was published a few years later.

On my next visit to Kensal Green which was on Halloween, I headed for the Dissenters' Chapel to see whether I was correct. I was! A plaque dedicated to him was placed outside the chapel in the 1990s, with Beatty himself buried in an unmarked vault, as per his instructions. Somewhere in my subconscious, I must have remembered this.

I have a few themed cycling adventures planned for the coming weeks (weather cooperating, of course) that will see me and one of my Brompton bicycles following some carefully planned routes. Watch out for those!

Until next time, stay safe out there (and wrap up warm)!