I wish you well in your campaign.

This has been going on for many years now, and it must have been 20 years or so ago that I attended a meeting with Southwark to protest at their first plans to expand the cemetery.

Southwark are adamant that the recreation ground is not designated as public open space. It has always been designated as burial ground, and they intend to use it as such.

The problem is not in truth that a minority of people do not accept cremation (which is far from an environmentally wonderful solution - it uses a vast amount of fossil fuel). It is that, as far as I know, uniquely in Europe, it is not possible to re-use burial land after a period of years. Local authorities have attempted to get goverment to change the position, but without success. Those committed to burial do not like the idea at all. When I chaired the relevant committee in Lewisham, we looked at what action we could take now to help matters in the future. One approach was to make it cheaper to purchase a deep plot (able to take four burials), than a single burial grave. You can guess what happened. We sold almost no deep plots, and while it might have helped the finances of the cemeteries dept, it did not contribute much to the long term problem of cemetery land supply.

Personally, I think Southwark are being short sighted. As you indicate, the extra land will not keep them going very long, and when it runs out, they will have to engage sympathetically with their local communities about how to deal with the problem. Fairly obviously, the only solutions will be either to acquire land further out from London - assuming that out of town local authorities are prepared to grant permissions; or for Southwark undertakers to use the cemeteries of other London authorities, putting more pressure on them.