Bunhill Fields burial ground in the City Road (near the Old Street roundabout) is one of the best-preserved in London – a beautiful park with the graves and memorials of London religious Non-Conformists, including William Blake, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe.

The graveyard had been particularly well-protected against the menace of the bodysnatchers: while the smaller parish and private grounds all around the St Luke’s and City Road area had been repeatedly ransacked in the quest for anatomical specimens, Bunhill took security very seriously. This spiked gate stood at the western edge of the graveyard for decades, and for long after the resurrection men had been sent into early retirement by the 1832 Anatomy Act.
   

The photographs below date from the Edwardian era, and show the eastern, City Road entrance to the burial ground – not so very different from how it looks today.