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A walk through this cemetery in c.1870 is described on pages 52-57 of May Sinclair’s 1919 novel ‘Mary Olivier: A Life’.  Mary is taken by her mother in a small carriage to the Manor Park railway crossing. They walk across a section of Wanstead Flats, enter the cemetery via a black wooden door in a hedge, and walk through the cemetery to the “big gates” at the Leytonstone side, where the carriage picks them up. The first section of the cemetery is described as having no tombstones, there is a “clay-coloured plain furrowed into low mounds” with “small flat sticks at one end of each grave showing where the heads were”. “The mounds had a fresh, raw look, as if all the people in the City of London had died and been buried hurriedly the night before.”

In one area the mounds are bigger than the others and the party is told it’s the “pauper buryin’ ground” where “there’s five coffins in each of these here graves, piled one atop of the other”. Across a gravel path are tombstones, in the rich variety of forms that we are used to seeing.  The party reach the “grey chapel with pointed gables”.

This all suggests that a large part of the south-west section of the cemetery was being filled in with graves all at the same time. That strikes us as very odd. Wikipedia’s history of the cemetery does not help.