Monument To Joseph Hughes, Middle Enclosure

635-1/0/10222 BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND 21-FEB-11 Monument to Joseph Hughes, Middle encl osure

GV II Obelisk monument to Joseph Hughes, 1874

LOCATION: 532702.3, 182259.1

MATERIALS: Granite

DESCRIPTION: The monument takes the form of a red granite obelisk with a pedimental base, set upon a square pedestal with moulded cornice and base, resting in turn upon a square two-stage plinth. The main inscription on the pedestal chronicles the facts of Hughes' life and work, while a secondary inscription on the plinth below records the erection of the present monument 'by friends who venerate his excellencies' in 1874.

HISTORY: Joseph Hughes (1769-1835) was born at Holborn and educated at schools in Lancashire and at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. From 1791 he was classical tutor at the Baptist Academy and assistant pastor at Broadmead Baptist Church in Bristol, becoming acquainted during the ensuing five years with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the writer and bluestocking Hannah More. In 1796 he returned to London to become pastor at a Baptist church in Battersea, where he remained until his death. He is chiefly remembered for his missionary activities, especially through the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society, which he helped to found in 1799 and 1804 respectively.

Bunhill Fields was first enclosed as a burial ground in 1665. Thanks to its location just outside the City boundary, and its independence from any Established place of worship, it became London's principal Nonconformist cemetery, the burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake and other leading religious and intellectual figures. It was closed for burials in 1853, laid out as a public park in 1867, and re-landscaped following war damage by Bridgewater and Shepheard in 1964-5.

SOURCES: Corporation of London, A History of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (1902). A W Light, Bunhill Fields (London, 1915). Rosemary Chadwick, entry on Joseph Hughes in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (retrieved on 9 June 2009).

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The monument to Joseph Hughes is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * It commemorates an important figure in British Missionary History, the co-founder of the influential Religious Tract Society and British and Foreign Bible Society. * It is an imposing granite obelisk, testifying to increasingly monumental late-C19 modes of commemoration. * It is located within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (q.v.), and has group value with the other listed tombs in the middle enclosure.