Its approach was based on the Congregational church's role in the London Missionary Society (LMS), whose fundamental principle was to develop a wholly non-denominational exemplar.

Though the park had not been formalised in 1840 as a cemetery through Act of Parliament or consecration, and Church faculty law never applied, burial ground use, had, by the 1880s, already come to predominate over the wider landscape, access and educational objects of its founders.

The founders' financial and legal structure, adapted from the model developed for garden cemeteries in America by City solicitor George Collison, aimed to establish a joint stock corporation managed by trustees.

However these matters could be put right and the park is a popular place to visit, with a range of educational, training and cultural events and an annual summer open day.

This frontage was built by John Jay in the then increasingly popular Egyptian Revival style, with hieroglyphics signifying the "Abode of the Mortal Part of Man": a venture too far into the architecture of the African continent for Augustus Pugin, who pilloried the idea, hoping no-one would repeat such a radical departure from "good" Christian gothic design (see illustration for Grounds of a Quaker School).

The gateway at Mount Auburn Cemetery, from which it took its inspiration, was at that time still a temporary structure, being made of dusted wood and sand; its permanent design was not built until two years after Abney Park opened.

At Abney Park the use of motifs not associated with contemporary faith served a profound purpose, since it was consciously opened as the first wholly nondenominational garden cemetery in Europe.

Abney Park was unique in being the first arboretum to be combined with a cemetery in Europe; offering an educational attraction that was originally set in a landscape of fields and woods, some distance from the built-up boundary of London.

The founding directors of the Abney Park project were all Congregationalists, who together with other nonconformists had strong links with their brethren in the New World, to where they had emigrated in search of religious freedom.

[citation needed] The concept of the arboretum—and indeed also a rosarium—was inspired by George Loddiges FLS FZS, a local Hackney nurseryman who became a small shareholder in the cemetery company and was appointed to lead its landscape design, planting and educational labelling, to complement William Hosking's layout and building and engineering (drainage) scheme.

Loddiges' earlier experience in designing an A to Z arboretum at his Mare Street nursery, and possession of one of the largest ranges of trees and shrubs then grown for sale in Britain, ensured success.

As nonconformists, who treasured the independence of their religious beliefs—and therefore practised Christianity outside of the established Church of England—they held the land itself to be of immense significance, for it had previously been two neighbouring and inter-related 18th-century parkland estates, the grounds of Abney House and Fleetwood House, where the non-conformist Doctor of Divinity, educationalist and poet Dr. Isaac Watts lived and taught, and indeed wrote several of his popular books and hymns.

Indeed, it stands today as the most important burial place in the UK of 19th-century Congregational, Baptist, Methodist and Salvation Army ministers and educationalists, including Christopher Newman Hall and many others, some of whom are mentioned below.

Selection of a site with historical associations with Dr Isaac Watts served this purpose well, for he had been honoured in death with a bust in the Anglican Westminster Abbey to complement his burial at the Independent's Bunhill Fields.

In fact, this part of north London, particularly Newington Green, had a long history of innovative education for boys and young men, known as dissenting academies.

It lost exclusive use of attractive grounds in the eastern part of Abney Park on formation of the cemetery, leaving only the school house and a small garden for the private use of the students.

[citation needed] Most notably, William and Catherine Booth, founders of The Salvation Army, are buried[12] in a prominent location close to Church Street and next to their son Bramwell Booth and various SA commissioners, including Elijah Cadman, John Lawley, James Dowdle,[13] William Ridsdel, Frederick Booth-Tucker, George Scott Railton, the Army's first Commissioner, Theodore Kitching and T. Henry Howard, its Chief of Staff.

Earlier in the 19th century, one of the hottest issues for political and social reform was the abolition of slavery, and Stoke Newington and the Quakers, separately and together, played a prominent role in this.

Indeed, William Wilberforce himself planned to be buried in the village at St Mary's Church with his sister, his will being overturned on his death since parliament considered a state funeral at Westminster Abbey more fitting.

[14] Wilberforce's brother-in-law, the abolitionist lawyer James Stephen, was also a frequent visitor, as his father lived at the Fleetwood Summerhouse adjacent to Abney Park.

At Abney Park Cemetery there are also some of the early settlers in Britain from the four corners of the world, such as the African, Thomas Caulker, the son of the King of Bompey (now Sierra Leone), who signed an anti-slavery agreement that became part of an Act of Parliament in the 1850s;[16][17] and Leota, a native of the Samoa Islands whose life in London was due to the work of the London Missionary Society who sought to build schools and bring scripture to the inhabitants of the South Seas.

Here too is the Welsh MP Henry Richard, a mid-19th-century secretary of the Peace Society, instrumental in encouraging the university in Wales at Aberystwyth along with its founder Sir Hugh Owen, whose own memorial is to the east of the Abney Park Cedar Circle.

[30] Other burials at the cemetery include the Chartist leader and publisher James "Bronterre" O'Brien, whose life and work is celebrated at the cemetery each year, especially by the Irish community and those in the Labour Movement; Dr John Pye Smith, the first dissenter to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; Mary Hays, the feminist writer and friend of Mary Wollstonecraft;[31] and Thomas William Robertson the dramatic author.

[33] A Victoria Cross recipient from the Indian Mutiny, Private John Freeman, is buried here, as are world record-holder in motor-paced cycling Tommy Hall and the public hangman William Calcraft.

Slightly off this exact axial alignment, is the small Blitz memorial that records civilian deaths, closer to the south entrance (picture right).

Though it suffered extensive property damage in the war, Stoke Newington's death toll was relatively low by the standards of some other Hackney districts like Shoreditch, and it would have been lower still, were it not for one incident on 13 October 1940, when a German bomb made a direct hit on a crowded shelter at Coronation Avenue, just off the High Street.

[citation needed] Under careful management, the woodland is slowly becoming enriched through natural regeneration and urban symbiosis, co-existing as it does with its long use as a London Borough of Hackney park open to the public.

Meanwhile, the sandy brickearth soils that extend from Church Street along Dr Watts' Walk to the chapel lawns, the sole surviving heathland in Hackney, are returning to a lighter structure based on silver birch woodland and healthy species such as bracken fern.

Today, a range of woodland birds, mammals and butterflies are supported, having grown in large numbers over the decades alongside the many humans and companion animals who use the grounds as a local park run by the London Borough of Hackney, and forming one of North London's largest breeding sites so close to the City for some very attractive species such as the speckled wood butterfly.

Nature changes gradually, however, and the ecology may need active habitat management moderated by the consensus of local residents, park users and their representatives that informs Hackney Council, if these semi-natural sylvan qualities are to be preserved and enhanced, and to ensure that the naturalising exotic arboretum trees (such as various-leaved hawthorn and service tree of Fontainebleau) and plans for the replacement of Loddiges' perimeter A to Z arboretum, contribute their valuable educational and botanical interest to parts of the grounds.