Some influential writers and thinkers are routinely omitted from historical overviews aimed at the general reader, with the result that even the greatest of them are scarcely known beyond the realm of specialists. Of these, the Scottish horticulturalist, gardener and, essentially, proto-town planner John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) must be one of the most outstanding: he was, as Professor Curl states in his introduction, a ‘colossus’. Born in Cambuslang, Lanarkshire, he arrived in England in 1803; over the next forty years he established an astonishing corpus of publications on landscape, gardening, botany, estate management and the planning of settlements and cheap, efficient housing; his Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture of 1833 was the first comprehensive methodical, scientific exploration of building layouts and construction; his Architectural Magazine (1834–8) was the first regular professional journal for architects, and in turn commissioned John Ruskin’s first series of essays. Given Loudon’s vast output – Curl’s biography lists nearly forty publications, and a further twelve by his wife and collaborator Jane, and those exclude the individual numbers of his various periodicals – it might have been hard to summarise his achievements in the few simple sentences that these overviews require. But this should not be difficult: Loudon was one of the few who managed to combine the scientific processes and unrelenting logical thought of the early nineteenth-century pioneers with a sensitive and generous awareness and acceptance of the sentiments and personal experiences of ordinary people, that is, the non-experts. In this respect, he was similar in the field of landscape planning to Nan Fairbrother, whose New Lives, New Landscapes (Reference Fairbrother1970) transformed the field to the extent that its effects are seen everywhere, without those ‘ordinary people’ having any idea of who she was.

Loudon arrived in London as a polemicist against the picturesque movement, and Humphry Repton in particular; in time he softened this stance, but he remained absolutely constant in his one central message, repeated many times across his publications: that garden planning must be rational, and thence educational and uplifting for both individuals and their families. Thus, in this final publication of 1843, Loudon’s recurrent theme is that death is a process that needs to be marked in a way that takes into account a number of objective factors: an efficient process of transferring a body to a burial ground; the decomposition of the body; the protection of the population from the dangers of crowded cemeteries and vaults; the marking of the passing of a family member in a reverent and moving way; the role that burial gardens might play in the lives of a healthy and contented population. Some aspects of the text are familiar from his other writing: dislike of the planted clumps, reminiscent of the pleasure-ground, that adorn the new cemetery at Norwood (‘Brown’ – no Capability here – might have been responsible for the fashion for them); an admiration for Scottish traditions, in this case for the dignified monuments in Grey Friars kirkyard in Edinburgh (Jacobean) and at St Michael’s, Dumfries (recent); a fascination with efficient gadgetry, here rotating biers with rollers and a vehicle called Mr Jukes’ Truck-Hearse, which extends to details such as handles and hinges; and detailed lists of appropriate plants and shrubs as a coda.

But what marks this publication out is Loudon’s anger at the ‘disgusting’ state of mass burials in a single grave. He refers directly to the revolting practice then commonplace in town churches, of piling corpse upon corpse either outside or within stinking catacombs, to the extent that they sometimes reached a level higher than the floor of the church. On a trip across eastern Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic wars he had seen repellent sights involving desecrated corpses; here he repeats time after time that there must remain 6’ of earth between each burial, forever. Of particular interest is his detailed specification for the design of a cemetery in Cambridge, the closest executed to his own design, and still in existence in recognisable form.

Loudon states that the cemetery curator ought to be a man of intelligence and cultivated feelings: was he thinking wistfully of himself? Curl’s long essay provides an invaluable, authoritative introduction both to the writer and to this work. It is rather more than a facsimile of Loudon’s final book, because the original edition was printed in tiny letters and on poor quality paper. This, by contrast, is a very finely produced publication, slightly enlarged, clear and sharp, and between cloth covers with gold foil blocking.