There's a harsh truth in statistics - as shown with devastating clarity by the annual figures from the UK's Cremation Society, which make for a grim yet compelling read. A 2017-2019 average of 609,000 deaths per year jumped in 2020 to 692,000, with the number of cremations rising by 70,000 to 543,000. A sole asterisk next to that figure directs the eye to another statistic-the 'direct cremation'; 54,000 services which, under strict Covid rules, were conducted without any family members present; laying a meniscus of absence on the volume of loss.And if such seemingly hard-nosed practicalities lie at the heart of Haverstock Associates' design for Guildford Borough Council's new crematorium, the firm is not the first to recognise their importance. Statistical arguments to challenge sentiment and ritual were central to the arguments of Sir Henry Thompson, physician to Queen Victoria's and author of the 1874 paper 'The Treatment of the Body after Death', that cremation was 'a necessary sanitary precaution against propagation of disease among a population daily growing larger in relation to the area it occupied'. But historical resistance, including the Bishop of Rochester's prohibition of crematoria on consecrated land and an Act to site them and their chimneys away from dense population centres, has shaped the nature of the typology: a novel funerary rite consigned to the modern suburbs. And with no bells or smoke or dropped clod, the agnostic, somewhat mechanistic process of cremations left an absence too at the heart of the service. This was addressed at Asplund's Chapel of the Holy Cross (1940) at the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm's suburb of Skogskyrkogarden. Here, at the architect's own cremation, says historian Dr Harriet Atkinson, was the only time the chapel's huge screen wall was fully opened to unite the catafalque with the raw nature outside.
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