English Heritage have placed it on the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens, describing it as the first cemetery to be designed in the Gothic Revival style.

It is a mixture of cleared, manicured, and mature landscaping, and includes Anglican and unconsecrated burial grounds, a crematorium, memorial gardens, columbarium, recordia, chapel, vaults and catacombs on top of a gently rolling hill, with views across south London.

The larger plots on the central higher ground and by the main drives were originally sold as prime locations and are the site of some of the grander Anglican monuments and mausolea, while the Greek Orthodox necropolis in the North East contains a high density of neoclassical architecture.

"[3] In 1830, George Frederick Carden, editor of The Penny Magazine, successfully petitioned Parliament about the parlous state of London's over-full church burial yards.

Over time they passed a number of laws that effectively halted burials in London's churchyards, moving them 'to places where they would be less prejudicial to the health of the inhabitants'.

Its design and location attracted the attention of wealthy – and aspirational – Victorians, who commissioned many fine mausoleums and memorials for their burial plots and vaults.

The main office at the front of the cemetery was also damaged by another flying bomb; it was rebuilt after the war in a style more sympathetic to its Gothic surroundings.

However, space for new burials had largely been exhausted by the inter-war years, and, deprived of this regular source of income, the cemetery company was unable to properly afford its upkeep or the repair of buildings damaged by wartime bombing.

Lambeth Council compulsorily purchased the cemetery in 1965, and controversially extinguished past rights and claimed ownership over the existing graves.

With the rise of the cremation movement the Cemetery Company identified this as a new source of revenue, and chose to rebuild part of the Dissenters' chapel in 1915 as a crematorium with access from the main hall or/and from the west.

This equipment is located entirely underground, and used the original Bramah hydraulic lift[6] of the catacombs to lower the coffin from the Crematorium Chapel at ground level, where a 'marshalling yard' of narrow gauge railway track allowed the bier to be moved to the correct furnace.

[8] Spencer John Bent, Victoria Cross recipient for action in World War I, who was cremated here, is commemorated in a garden of remembrance.

Charles Spurgeon, Baptist preacher, Isabella Beeton (the famous cookery writer), who died at 28 in childbirth, Lloyd Jones, Co-operative Society activist, to name but a few.

In 1847 some 12,000 remains were taken from the burial vault beneath the Enon Chapel near The Strand, which, after a public health scandal, was bought by George Walker, a prominent surgeon, who had the bodies removed to Norwood Cemetery for reburial in a single mass grave.

[10][11] A Victoria Cross recipient from the Indian Mutiny, South Africa-born Joseph Petrus Hendrik Crowe, was originally buried here in 1876 but following the discovery of his grave in neglected condition his body was exhumed and reburied in his native town of Uitenhage in 1977.