Abney Park cemetery is one of the "Magnificent Seven" cemeteries in London, England. Abney Park in Stoke Newington in the London Borough of Hackney is a historic parkland originally laid out in the early 18th century by Lady Mary Abney, Dr. Isaac Watts and the neighbouring Hartopp family. In 1840 it became a non-denominational garden cemetery, a semi-public park arboretum, and an educational institute, which was widely celebrated as an example of its time. A total of 196,843 burials had taken place there up to the year 2000. It is a Local Nature Reserve. Location The official address of Abney Park is Stoke Newington High Street, N16. The main gate is at the junction of this street and Rectory Road, with a smaller gate on Stoke Newington Church Street. The park lies within the London Borough of Hackney. The nearest station is the London Overground Stoke Newington railway station which is 200 metres from the Stoke Newington High Street entrance. Past and present The cemetery is named after Sir Thomas Abney, who served as Lord Mayor of London in 1700–1701. The manor of Stoke Newington belonged to him in the early 18th century and his town house, Abney House, built in 1676, stood on the site of the present cemetery until its demolition in the 1830s. In 1840, Abney Park opened as a model garden cemetery, a pioneering non-denominational place of rest. Its approach was based on the Congregational church's role in the London Missionary Society (LMS), whose fundamental principle was to develop a wholly non-denominational exemplar. It also drew on American burial ideas, specifically Mount Auburn in Massachusetts. Details of the Abney Park Cemetery Company can be found in the diaries of William Copeland Astbury (volumes covering 1831–48) At first there were many links between Abney Park Cemetery and the LMS but this nonconformist (and in particular Congregationalist) period came to a close in the early 1880s when a strictly commercial general cemetery company was formed and the land at Abney Park was made over to the new enterprise. Though the park had not been formalised in 1840 as a cemetery through Act of Parliament or consecration, and Church faculty law never applied, burial ground use, had, by the 1880s, already come to predominate over the wider landscape, access and educational objects of its founders. The founders' financial and legal structure, adapted from the model developed for garden cemeteries