An ostentation of solitariness: looking for the wilderness in Abney Park Cemetery
I’m going to take the easy way out and suggest that the physical location of the former wilderness isn’t actually that important. In the context of a mapped and clearly demarcated space, the use of the word ‘wilderness’ describes a human aspiration to a particular kind of experience. The seventeenth century garden wilderness, like the ‘managed wilderness’ which fills Abney Park today, embodies various ideas about people and nature, organised in a way that is no less deliberate for not being aggressively overt.
Bridget Penney broods on experiences of wilderness.