It is regarded as one of the seven great cemeteries of the Victorian era, the "Magnificent Seven", instigated because the normal (until that time) church burial plots had become overcrowded.

Since the 1990s it has been managed by the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, a registered charity, with the purpose of protecting, preserving and promoting this important space for conservation, heritage and community.

Before the Victorian era, all of London's dead were buried in small urban churchyards, which became so overcrowded and so close to where people lived, worked, and worshipped that they were causing disease and ground water contamination.

An Act of Parliament was passed which allowed joint-stock companies to purchase land and set up large cemeteries outside the boundaries of the City of London (a.k.a.

Highgate Cemetery is the most well known, with hundreds of notable interments; the others are Nunhead, West Norwood, Kensal Green, Brompton and Abney Park.

Tower Hamlets Cemetery was formally consecrated by the Bishop of London Charles James Blomfield on Saturday 4 September 1841 prior to being opened for burials.

The Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park is an independent charity established in 1990, to preserve, protect and celebrate the site's important role in conservation, heritage and community.

The charity's main objective is to encourage greater use of this inner urban green space as a sanctuary for people and a place of biodiversity.

[13] Though filled with gravestones and funerary monuments, the cemetery has been allowed to revert to resemble a natural woodland, with many wildflowers, birds, and insect species found in the park.

Those who are buried or have memorials here include: Burial monuments listed by Historic England: Others: There are 279 Commonwealth service personnel of both World Wars buried here, the names of all being listed on bronze panels on a screen wall memorial in the Mile End section of the park near the entrance on Southern Grove, as are those of four Dutch merchant seamen.

Nine British merchant seamen are buried here who were killed when their ship, SS Bennevis, was hit by a high explosive bomb on 7 September 1940, while berthed in the West India Docks, during an air raid in World War II.