Abney Park Anniversary

The last time I went to Abney Park Cemetery, the chapel was closed pending renovation, and a good thing too considering how ruinous it had become. A couple of weeks ago, of a Saturday evening, I returned, this time in the company of Lady Wildwood, Ms DarkMorte and a couple of dozen other souls. The occasion was a concert by Katherine Blake, founder of sort-of early-music group The Mediaeval Baebes, and a pair of colleagues; Ms Blake told us how the band's very first gig, if you could so call it, had been an illicit night-time incursion into Abney Park exactly 23 years before. This gathering was far more official, and we were ushered through the darkness by Cemetery volunteers in reflective tabards to take our places in the chapel, fortified by drinks of our choosing. 

The concert didn't take long, barely 45 minutes of pieces from the group's output: I describe them as 'sort-of early-music' because a lot of their stuff is made up, the kind of thing we might fantasise that people in the Middle Ages liked to sing rather than what we know they did. The latest album, for instance, consists of nursery rhymes put through what we might reasonably describe as the Carmina Burana filter. It was all very engaging. As I sat listening to such Godly fare as 'Adam Lay y-Bounden' (a version of which our church choir sings in Advent), 'Salva Nos Stella Maris', and 'Ecce Mundi Gaudium', a question occurred to me which I've often wondered about before - what Ms Blake and her compatriots feel about singing so much Christian content. I didn't get a chance to ask.

The unsung star was the Chapel itself. Not a work of any great architectural distinction (as opposed to distinctiveness - it's certainly that), the refurbishment has stripped it of its rotting, graffiti-ed plaster and made it look some centuries older than in fact it is, a towering bare relic of the Middle Ages it strove to recall in the first place. You couldn't have anywhere more appropriate.