BRIEF HISTORY DURING THE SNOW ERA (1813-58)

The Brompton Cemetery was originally The West of London and Westminster Cemetery founded in 1837.  The Board of Directors was authorized to develop a 40 acre site which contained a chapel and catacombs.  As designed by Benjamin Baud, the cemetery has a formal layout which includes a chapel loosely based on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The land occupied by cemetery was originally fields and market-gardens owned mostly by Lord Kensington and finally acquired from him in 1839.  An additional 4.5 acres was obtained in 1844 from the Equitable Gas Company, enabling the cemetery to have access to Fulham Road.  The cemetery was bought from the private owners in 1852 by London's General Board of Health and became the first London cemetery under government control. 

The cemetery was originally designed to accommodate 60,000 plots in a combination of common and private graves.  The graves were usually spaced 3 inches apart and some were dug almost 22 feet deep to take up to 10 burials. 

It is here that John Snow was buried in a private grave in 1858 (see below).  His original tomb was restored in 1895, again in 1938, but destroyed by bombings during World War II in 1941. The tomb was replaced in 1951 by the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland.

In Stanford's 1862 map, Brompton Cemetery was cited as the West London Cemetery, while in the Old Ordnance Survey map of 1865, the citation is West London and Westminster Cemetery.

See the Brompton Cemetery section in John Snow's Final Rest for additional details, including photographs of his grave monument.

Sources:

Pierce P. Brompton Cemetery. The Royal Parks. 1993. 
Weinreb B, Hibbert C (eds). The London Encyclopaedia, 1993.