The complex of three Victorian buildings at the Willesden Jewish Cemetery in London has been entered as a Grade II site on England’s National Heritage List. According to the cemetery, it marks first time that Jewish Cemetery funerary buildings have been listed.
The complex was built in Gothic Revival style in 1872-73 by Nathan Solomon Joseph as part of his comprehensive design for the cemetery. It includes a Prayer Hall or ‘ohel’, a Cohanim Room, and a Mortuary or ‘bet taharah’, together with a WC Range (extended in the early C20). (An Assembly Hall or ‘Portico’ was added to the Prayer Hall in 1929, to the design of Harry Wharton Ford, and an additional WC block was added to the Mortuary and WC Range in the early 20th century).
The complex of funerary buildings at the head of the central avenue forms the focal point of the cemetery. Each of the buildings plays a specific role in Jewish burial practice. The central Prayer Hall receives the coffin and mourners for the preliminary prayers; entered from the north, the southern doorway leads to the burial grounds. The Assembly Hall was added to the north of the Prayer Hall in 1929 by the architect Harry Wharton Ford (1875-1947), providing a space for mourners to gather. The Cohanim Room was intended for the use of those men believed to be descended from the High Priest Aaron, who may have the name Cohen, or a related name, and who for reasons of ritual purity must not come into direct contact with a dead body or walk amongst the graves of a cemetery; it therefore allowed the Cohanim to be present at a funeral, though the room is no longer used for this purpose. The Mortuary, for the ritual ablution of the dead, was in use until the 1980s. The building is part of the original complex, as is the attached WC block to the west. The larger WC block, which balances the Mortuary visually, appears to have been added at some time between the surveys made for the 1896 and 1915 Ordnance Survey maps. Behind the Mortuary is a row of basins for mourners to wash their hands before returning to the Prayer Hall for prayers following the interment, or before leaving the cemetery. The buildings remain largely unchanged externally since 1929, and with few internal modifications.
It states that the motivation for listed the complex was because of its architectural interest
as a distinctive group of Jewish funerary buildings in a well-detailed Gothic style, by the prominent Jewish architect N S Joseph; the buildings survive essentially intact, with two harmonious and balanced additions
And because of its historic interest
the buildings form the central focus of the cemetery, designed by Joseph as the first venture of the newly formed United Synagogue; the scale and quality of the buildings reflect the status of the cemetery, which served Anglo-Jewry’s most established communities; * Jewish ohels, or funerary prayer halls, survive in relatively small numbers, and a group of this size, illustrating the complete process of Jewish burial practice, is a rarity.
The Willesden Jewish Cemetery includes more than 20,000 graves and one of the largest and most important of England’s Victorian-era Jewish burial places. It is currently framing plans for its conservation and development as a heritage site as well as to make it more accessible to the public.
The National Heritage List for England, or ‘The List’, originated in 1882, when the first powers of protection were established. But this year marks 70 years since the post-WW2 Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 marked was the birth of today’s listed building system. By now the List includes nearly 400,000 entries, drawing together “all scheduled monuments, listed buildings, registered landscapes and battlefields, and protected wrecks.”
The Willesden cemetery complex is one of five sites newly listed to mark this 70th anniversary.
Click here to read about development plans for the cemetery