I'll Meet You at the Cemetery Gates

What better way to spend a rare sunny lunchtime in winter than to wander round looking at graves? I admit, it does tend to give lend the following afternoon a bit of a somber tone, but try finding green spaces in the middle of London that don't contain some sort of monument to the dearly departed. It's not that easy.

Also, I just like graveyards. It's the repressed goth in me.

Mooching around St Pancras churchyard recently, I came across the 'Hardy Tree',

When they put the railway through to St Pancras station in the 1860s, they gave the task of exhuming the bodies and shifting the tombstones to none other than Thomas Hardy (obvious choice).

Hardy took the stones and fanned them out in a circle, at the centre of which he planted an Ash tree. 140something years later, the effect is pretty remarkable.