East London Cemetery

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The East London Cemetery and Crematorium is in Plaistow in the London Borough of Newham. The cemetery was founded in 1871 and laid out in 1872 to meet the increasing demand from the eastern suburbs of London. The first interment was in August 1872 and remains open.

The cemetery covers 33 acres (0.13 km²) next to the Greenway and has two Gothic chapels built at the end of the 19th century that remain in use. A burial chapel dedicated to Church of St Michael and All Angels, and a non-denominational chapel for cremations.

[edit] Memorials

Among the graves is a memorial to the 550 victims of the 1878 SS Princess Alice disaster. A memorial, marked by a ship's anchor, commemorates those who died when the staging collapsed during the launching of HMS Albion in 1898. A further disaster, the Silvertown explosion of 1917, is commemorated in the grave of Andrea Angel, chemist at the Brunner Mond chemical works whose TNT plant exploded damaging up to 70,000 properties in the area, killing 73 people and causing over 400 casualties.