‘The place feels like a metaphor for life’: Jack Guinness

The way the paths are laid out here feels like a metaphor for life. Whichever one you choose to amble down, you can always find your way out and home. Along the way you might wander into an open glade, discover the chapel – which, when it was in a state of disrepair, felt like the setting of a Brontë novel – and work through anything on your mind. I find myself here nearly every day. It’s where I meet friends for coffee; I loop through to get to Stoke Newington Church Street.

During lockdown I found out that two of my great aunts, who died of TB when they were children in around 1904, were buried here. It’s weird to think I’d been walking past their graves without realising the personal connection. Most of my male ancestors, going back to Arthur Guinness, were vicars or missionaries. Growing up gay in the Church of England was traumatising and difficult, so being in this holy, sacred space has helped me reintegrate disparate parts of myself. It’s a non-sectarian cemetery with some real characters, like East End entertainers and abolitionists, buried here. Welcoming those who have been othered by society is part of its appeal. I’ve been thinking about friends who are struggling with illness, and family members getting older. Dying is something we must face. Walking through this graveyard, my main thoughts are not of death, but of the challenge it gives us of how to live.