Sing A Song of Kensal Green

Kensal Green Cemetery is the final resting place of many composers, performers and people with musical connections. We will uncover the stories behind their famous and infamous adventures, learn about their music and sing a few songs along the way.

In Kensal Green Cemetery lies a wealth of musical fame,
Composers, singers, performers, who gained great acclaim.
Let's stroll the winding paths and discover their stories,
And pay tribute to their talents, and their glories.

The tour will be conducted by long term voluntary cemetery guide and Blue Badge Guide Joy Levene.  She has been an amateur actress and performer for 60 years.

The tour covers a lot of ground but at least we can rest a bit at our first stop - to Henry Russell, prolific composer of some 700 songs. His best known song is The Old Armchair, and is the shape of his monument.

En route we will meet two George Grossmiths, father and son.  One was for many years principal comic tenor for Gilbert & Sullivan's operettas - the master of the 'patter song, buried with his son, comic actor and scion of the Gaiety Theatre.  We will discover the G&S connection with a famous bookstore and stationers.  

Among the people we encounter are music hall performers, composers, actors, opera singers, musicians, set designers, music publishers and hear the sad tale of a successful tenor who made a fortune and lost it in disastrous property speculation.  

There are a trio of brothers / a light comedian, a 'low' comedian and a scene painter and designer. Before we end we will see a third and final George Grossmith, plus a cockney singer and dancer, who, despite being a Londoner, specialised in Irish roles.  There is a supremely talented theatrical set designer of operas, plays and a musical, best known today for her stunning set of The Phantom of the Opera - cue music -and the composer of a melodramatic ballad set in the condemned cell at Newgate jail.  At the end we will play Kensal Green's own anthem - Chesterton's The Rolling English Road - first as a song by Maddy Prior and then as the poem we know well.