Monument To Joseph Ivimey, South Enclosure

635-1/0/10251 BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND 21-FEB-11 Monument to Joseph Ivimey, South enclo sure

GV II Headstone of Joseph Ivimey, 1834

LOCATION: 532624.8, 182212.7

MATERIALS: Portland stone

DESCRIPTION: The monument takes the form of a vertical stone slab with an arched top. The inscription, now only partly legible, describes Ivimey's long tenure as pastor of the Eagle Street Baptist Church, and gives the date of his death.

HISTORY: Joseph Ivimey (1773-1834) was a leading Particular Baptist minister and historian of the Baptist movement. Born in Ringwood, Hampshire, he initially trained as a tailor; in 1790 he was received into the Particular (Calvinist) Baptist church and in 1794 gave up his trade to become an itinerant preacher. In 1803 he became assistant minister at the chuch in Wallingford, now in Oxfordshire, and a year later he moved to London to take up the incumbency at the Eagle Street church in Holborn. As an increasingly important figure in the London Baptist community, Ivimey worked to promote missionary activity abroad, and to foster closer links between Baptist churches - he was in large measure responsible for the formation of the Baptist Union in 1812. . His four-volume History of the English Baptists was published between 1811 and 1830; other published works include a number of sermons (many reflecting his staunch anti-Catholicism), a biography of John Bunyan, and a modern-day continuation of the latter's classic allegory entitled Pilgrims of the Nineteenth Century.

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). Alexander Gordon, rev. L E Lauer, entry on Ivimey in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (retrieved on 9 June 2009).

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The monument to Joseph Ivimey is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * It commemorates a prominent early-C19 Baptist leader, who founded the Baptist Union and wrote one of the first systematic histories of the movement. * 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 south enclosure.