So, I have an overlooked but potentially lucrative investment opportunity for you.
Over the past 10 years in the UK, the return on burial plots has outperformed the UK
property market by a ratio of around three to one.
There are private cemeteries being set up with plots for sale to investors and
they start at around 3900 pounds. And they are projected to achieve about 40
percent growth. The biggest advantage is that this is a market with continuous
demand. Now, this is a real proposition and there are companies out there that
really are offering this investment, but my interest in it quiet different.
I am an architect and urban designer, and for the past year and a half, I’ve
been looking at approaches to death and dying and at how they’ve shaped our
cities and the buildings within them. So, in the summer, I did my first exhibition
on death and architecture in Venice and it was called ” Death in Venice ”. And
because death is a subject that many of us find quiet uncomfortable to talk about,
the exhibition was designed to be quiet playful so that people would literally
engage with it. So one of our exhibits was an interactive map of London which
showed just how much of the real estate in the city is given over to death.
As you wave your hand across the map, the name of piece of real estate—building
or the cemetery is revealed. And those white shapes that you can see, they’re
all of the hospitals and hospices and mortuaries and cemeteries in the city.
In fact, the majority are cemeteries. We wanted to show that, even though death
and burial are things that we might not think about, they’re all around us,
and they’re important parts of our cities.
So about half a million people die in the UK each year, and of those, around a
quarter will want to be buried. But the UK, like many Western European countries,
is running out of burial space, especially in the major cities. And the greater
London authority has been aware of this for a while and the main causes are
population growth, the fact that the existing cemeteries are almost full.
There’s a custom in the UK that graves are considered to be occupied forever
and there’s also development pressure—people want to use that same land to
build houses or offices or shops. So they came up with a few solutions.
They were like, well, maybe we can reuse those graves after 50 years.
Or maybe we can bury people, four deep, so that four people can be buried in the
same plot and we can make more efficient use of the land that way. And in that way,
hopefully London will still have space to bury people in the near future.
But, traditionally, cemeteries haven’t been taken care of by the local authority.
In fact, the surprising thing is that there’s no legal obligation on anyone in the UK
to provide burial space. Traditionally, it’s been done by private and religious organizations,
like churches and mosques and synagogues. But there’s also occasionally been a
for-profit group who has wanted to get in on the act . And, you know, they look at
the small size of a burial plot and that high cost, and it looks like
there’s serious money to be made.
So, actually, if you want to go out and start your own cemetery you kind of can.
There was this couple in South Wales and they had a farmhouse and a load of fields
next to it and they wanted to develop the land. They had a load of ideas.
They first thought about making a caravan park, but the council said no.
And then they wanted to make a fish farm, and again the council said no.
Then they hit on the idea of making a cemetery. And they calculated that by doing
this they could increase the value of their land from about 95000 pounds to over
1 million pounds. But just to come back to this idea of making profit from
cemeteries, like, it’s kind of ludicrous, right? The thing is that the high
cost of those burial plots is actually misleading. They look like they are expensive,
but the cost reflects the fact that you need to maintain the burial plot, like,
someone has to cut the grass for the next 50 years. That means that it’s difficult
to make money from the cemeteries. And it’s the reason that normally they’re run by
the council or by a not-for-profit group. But anyway, the council granted these
people permission and they are now trying to build their cemetery.
So just to explain to you kind of how this works. If I want to build something in the UK,
like a cemetery for example, then I have to apply for planning permission first.
So if I want to build a new office building for a client or if I want to extend my house,
or, you know, if I have a shop and I want to convert it into an office.
I have to do a load of drawings and I submit them to the council for permission.
And, they’ll look at things like how it fits in the surroudings.
So they’ll look at what it looks like. But they also thinks about things like
what impact is it going to have on the local environment. And they’ll be
thinking about things like is this thing going to cause pollution or is there
going to be a lot of traffic that want to go this things that I’ve built.
But also good things, is it going to add local services like shops to the neighborhood
that local people would like to use. And they’ll weigh up the advantages and
the disadvantages and they’ll make a decision. So that’s how it works if
I want to build a large cemetery. But what if I’ve got a piece of land, and
I just want to bury a few people, like five or six? Well, then—actually,
I don’t need permission from anyone. There’s actually almost no regulation
in the UK about burial and the little bit that there is, is about not polluting
water resources, like not polluting rivers or groundwater. So actually,
if you want to go and make your own mini-cemetery, then you can. But I mean,
like-really, who does this？Right? Well, if you are an aristocratic family
and you have a large estate, and there’s a chance that you’ll build a mausoleum
on it and you’ll bury your family there. But the weird thing is that you don’t
need to have a piece of land of certain size. And so that means that, technically,
this applies to, like, the back garden of your house in the suburbs.
So what if you want to try this yourself at home? Well, there’s a few councils
that have guidance on their website which can help you. So, the first thing they
tell you is that you need to have a certificate of burial before you can go ahead,
you are not allowed to just murder people and put them in the patio.
They also tell you that you need to keep a record of where the grave is.
But that’s pretty much it for formal requirements. Now, they do warn you
that your neighbors might not like this, but , legally speaking, there is
almost nothing that they can do about it. And just in case any of you still
had that profit idea in your mind about how much those burial plots cost and
how much money you might be able to make, they also warn that it might cause
the value of your house to drop by20 percent. Although, actually, it’s more
likely that no one will want to buy your house at all after that. So what I
find fascinating about this is the fact that it kind of sums up many of our
attitudes towards death.
In the UK, and I think that the figures across Europe are probably similar,
only about 30 percent of people have ever talked to anyone about their wishes
around death and even for people over 75 only 45 percent of people have ever
talked about this. And the reasons that people give…you know, they think that
their death is far off or they think that they’re going to make people
uncomfortable by talking about it. And you know, to a certain extent.
there are other people out there who are taking care of things for us.
The government has all this regulation and bureaucracy around things
like burying a death ,for example, and there’s people like funeral directors
who devote their entire working lives to this issue.
But when it comes to our cities and thinking about how death fits in our
cities, there’s much less regulation and design and thought than
we might imagine. So we’re not thinking about this, but all of the people
we imagine are thinking about it they’re not taking care of it either.