Gunnersbury Cemetery

Gunnersbury Cemetery was established in 1929 when the Borough of Kensington's Cemetery at Hanwell was full. Situated adjacent to Gunnersbury Park, the land was originally part of the Rothschild Gunnersbury Park estate. The chapel is a simple brick building, recently refurbished, and the drive from the entrance is lined with displays of flower tubs and floral bedding arrangements, including shrubs such as camellias and roses along the side walls. With paths laid out in a grid pattern, the cemetery has well-kept grass and numerous fine trees, including mature horse chestnut trees near the entrance that date from before the cemetery was laid out, part of Gunnersbury Park planting.

The southern part of the cemetery is largely reserved for Roman Catholic burials, with many Polish, East Europeans and White Russians buried here, including the Romanoff Vsevolod, Prince of Russia (d.1973), who was the great-great grandson of Nicholas I and cousin of the last Czar. A slab bears the inscription that 'here rests the Bodies of Cossacks' with 5 names. Others buried include General Tadeuz Bòr-Komorowski (d.1966) Commander of the Polish resistance in WWII, who ordered the Warsaw uprising in August 1944 and became Commander and Chief of Polish forces in the west; General Jozef Smolenski (d.1978), a Polish cavalry officer who wrote a history of the 7th Lancers. The Roman Catholic chapel was destroyed by bombing in WWII and on its site the Katyn Memorial was later erected, a black obelisk designed by Louis Fitzgibbon. In 1976 this memorial was dedicated by Count Stefan Zamoyski to the 14,500 Polish prisoners of war who disappeared from the camps, 4,500 of whom were later identified in a mass grave at Katyn near Smolensk, then occupied by the Russians. Others buried here include Lord Broughshane of Kensington (d.1953), Mayor from 1913-19 and Tory MP of Kensington from 1918-1945; film director Sir Carol Reed (d. 1976); and Alfred (d.1963) and Guiseppe (d.1946) Messina, Maltese-born Soho vice racketeers.