Flavell Family Monument, South Enclosure

635-1/0/10278 BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND 21-FEB-11 Flavell family monument, South enclosure

GV II Headstone of the Flavell family, late C18

LOCATION: 532746.1, 182233.7

MATERIALS: Portland stone

DESCRIPTION: The monument takes the form of an upright stone slab with a shaped top. The scrolled upper section bears a relief carving showing a trumpet-carrying putto - presumably the Angel of the Resurrection - flying above a broken tomb with storm clouds overhead and an open book beneath. (A nearby - unlisted - headstone displays the same iconography, albeit with cruder carving and without legible text.) The inscription below commemorates Mary Flavell (d.1775) and other members of her family.

HISTORY: 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).

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The monument to Mary Flavell is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * a well-carved and iconographically complex example of late-Baroque monumental sculpture. * located within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (q.v.), it has group value with the other listed tombs in the south enclosure, and in particular with the strongly contrasting Yallowley monument in the adjoining plot.