Description

635-1/0/10249 BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND
21-FEB-11 Monument to David Nasmith, South enclo
sure

GV II
Headstone of David Nasmith, 1839, restored 1935

LOCATION: 532617.2, 182222.4

MATERIALS: Portland stone, whitewashed

DESCRIPTION: The monument takes the form of an upright stone slab with a pedimented top. The inscription names Nasmith as a 'founder of city missions' and gives details of his birth and death. A second inscription records the monument's restoration 'by friends of the London City Mission during that society's centenary year'.

HISTORY: David Nasmith (1799-1839) was a leading early-C19 evangelical and the founder of the City Mission movement, a still-flourishing (and now worldwide) association aimed at ministering to the spiritual and physical needs of the urban poor. Born and educated in Glasgow, Nasmith devoted himself from an early age in missionary activity. The Glasgow City Mission, which he helped found in 1826, became a model for hundreds of similar organisations worldwide. The Dublin City Mission followed in 1828, and in 1830 Nasmith set off on a tour of North America, helping to set up over thirty new mission groups en route. On moving to London in 1835 he became co-founder (with Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton) of the London City Mission, a leading force in the capital's evangelical life and still in existence today.

Bunhill Fields was first enclosed as a burial ground in 1665. Thanks to its location just outside the City boundary, and its independence from any Established place of worship, it became London's principal Nonconformist cemetery, the burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake and other leading religious and intellectual figures. It was closed for burials in 1853, laid out as a public park in 1867, and re-landscaped following war damage by Bridgewater and Shepheard in 1964-5.

SOURCES: Corporation of London, A History of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (1902).
A W Light, Bunhill Fields (London, 1915).
Gordon Goodwin, rev. H C G Matthew, entry on Nasmith in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (retrieved on 9 June 2009).

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The monument to David Nasmith is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* It commemorates an important early-C19 evangelical leader and the founder of the still-flourishing City Mission movement.
* It is located within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (q.v.), and has group value with the other listed tombs in the south enclosure.

Reasons for Listing

DCMS agree- list at Grade II.

External Links

• Historic England Listing
• Wikidata Q27087446

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.

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