East London Cemetery and Crematorium

The East London Cemetery was laid out in 1872 for the East London Cemetery Company Ltd, with a pair of Gothic chapels built in the centre of the cemetery after 1888: a Nonconformist chapel to the west, and to east an Anglican mortuary chapel. The Nonconformist chapel was disused between 1910-1914 and became a storeroom but since 1954 has served as a crematorium when the crematory was built. A small room for a Book of Remembrance has been created in one corner of the Chapel. Facing the main entrance is a large area set aside for cremation urns, planted with standard roses. There was a lodge next to the Grange Road entrance, shown on the OS Map 3rd edition of 1916, but no longer present.

The west side of the cemetery has been used as a burial ground for members of Chinese and Japanese communities living in London, with a memorial erected in 1927 dedicated to all Chinese who had died in England.

Among notable monuments is that commemorating the sinking of the 'Princess Alice' in 1878, which at that time was deemed to be the worst civilian disaster in British history with over 700 lives lost. It is likely that the scale of the disaster was exacerbated by the river's pollution by sewage, which at that time was discharged untreated from the Northern Outfall Sewage works at Beckton. After 1887 sewage was treated chemically and only the effluent was allowed to run into the river, with special ships removing the sludge far out to sea. Another memorial, marked by a ship's anchor, commemorates those who were killed during the launching of HMS Albion in 1898 when the staging collapsed. Another disaster, the Silvertown Explosion of 1917, is commemorated in the grave of Andrea Angel, chemist at the Brunner Mond chemical works whose TNT plant exploded damaging up to 70,000 properties in the area, killing 73 people and causing c.450 casualties, in all £2.5million worth of damage. The war memorial on North Woolwich Road also commemorates those who died in the Silvertown explosion.

The East London Cemetery Company War Memorial was unveiled on 22 February 1917 by the Mayor of West Ham, and dedicated by the Bishop of Barking. It is unusual in that it was erected before the end of the war, a practice that began as casualties mounted with memorials erected by private families, before community war memorials began to be built, such as the street shrines found in the East End. The erection of war memorials when the conflict still raged was frowned on by some. The East London Cemetery Company chose to commemorate those who had fought and suffered in the war, and the dedication makes reference to Britain's Allies: the 'Sons of the British Empire', their families and Britain's allies. The monument is of a striking design with a wheel-head cross mounted on a rough-hewn stone pillar. Originally the dates inscribed on the monument were 1914-17, indicating the hope that the war would end before the unveiling, but the date was later changed to 1918, and the list of allies was amended to include America, which only entered the war in April 1917. 

Another memorial reflecting the devastation of WWI is a marble memorial marking the mass grave of 15 infants from Upper North Street School in Poplar, who were killed on 13 June 1917, when a bomb dropped on the school during the first air-raid by a German Army High Command squadron of 20 aircraft created specifically to bomb England. 18 children died with at least 37 others injured. The children were buried in East London Cemetery on 20 June 1917, 15 in this mass grave, with 3 given private burials. Nearby is the grave of the school caretaker, whose son is buried in the mass grave. 

The cemetery is now run by Dignity Funerals Ltd, which owns a number of other cemeteries and crematoria in London including Beckenham Crematorium and Cemetery (q.v.) in Bromley and Streatham Park Cemetery and South London Crematorium (q.v.) in Merton.