- On an episode of Whitechapel, BBC America’s new crime drama, DI Chandler (Rupert Penry-Jones) and Buchan (Steve Pemberton) pay a visit to the grave of Mary Kelly, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims. That tomb is just one of Britain’s best-known final resting places. Take a look at 10 of Britain’s most famous graves. (AP Photo above, of Sir Winston Churchill‘s burial site)
- The wordsmith behind those timeless sonnets and plays is buried in his hometown church, the place where he was baptized as a child. His grave is notable for its stern warning, inscribed on a stone, “Blese be ye man yt spares thes stones/And curst be he yt moves my bones.” (Press Association via AP Images)
- The portly two-time prime minister, known for leading Britain through World War II, died 20 years after Britain declared victory over Germany. After a funeral attended by Queen Elizabeth II, he was buried in the Churchill family plot at St. Martin, Church in Bladon, Oxfordshire.
- This is an aerial view of the lake at the Althorp estate, the ancestral home of the Spencer family in Northampton. The Princess of Wales, who was killed in a tragic 1997 car crash, was laid to rest in the island at the center of the lake. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
- The legendary scientist is one of the many renowned Britons buried in Westminster Abbey. He was entombed in the Abbey on March 28, 1727, his grave bearing a Latin inscription (Hic depositum est, quod mortale fuit Isaaci Newtoni./Here lies that which was mortal of Isaac Newton). (Press Association via AP Images)
- Not far from Sir Isaac Newton’s grave is the tomb of Darwin, the visionary behind the modern theory of natural selection. He died in 1882. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
- Transported from a French battlefield during World War I, the body of this unidentified British soldier was buried in Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day in 1920. The tombstone is made of Belgian black marble with a brass inscription. It is the only grave in the Abbey on which visitors are not allowed to walk. (AP Photo)
- It is fitting that the grave of the Pilgrim’s Progress author (who died in 1688) features a carved representation of a pilgrim on its side. Bunyan is interred in London’s Bunhill Fields Cemetery, which was designated in the 1660s as a burial ground for Non-Comformist figures (such as Daniel Defoe and Quaker George Fox). (Press Association via AP Images)
- The Robinson Crusoe author, who died in 1731, is also buried in Bunhill Fields, his tomb an imposing obelisk. (Press Association via AP Images)
- The poet William Blake’s grave is adjacent to Daniel Defoe’s tomb in Bunhill Fields. (Press Association via AP Images)
- The German philosopher lived his final years in London and was buried in the Highgate Cemetery in north London, the site of many famous graves, including those of George Eliot, Malcolm McLaren, Jean Simmons, and Hitchhiker’s Guide novelist Douglas Adams. (Press Association via AP Images)
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