Reasons for Designation
Details
635-1/0/10235 BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND
21-FEB-11 Monument to Andrew Kippis, West enclos
ure
GV II
Headstone of Andrew Kippis, 1795
LOCATION: 532629.3, 182254.3
MATERIALS: Portland stone
DESCRIPTION: The monument is an upright stone slab with a pedimented top and a small footstone re-set at the base. The main text, now only partly legible, records the burials of Andrew Kippis and his wife Elizabeth (d.1796), along with that of a family friend, one Joseph Littlefear (d.1832).
HISTORY: Andrew Kippis (1725-95) was a leading Presbyterian minister, scholar and biographer. Born in Nottingham and educated by his grandfather and at Philip Doddridge's academy at Northampton, he began his ministry as pastor to an Independent congregation in Sleaford, Lincolnshire in 1746; from 1753 until his death he was minister at the Presbyterian meeting-house in Princes Street, Westminster. He also taught for many years at the Hoxton Academy and, later, at New College in Hackney. A noted champion of Dissenters' rights and religious liberty, Kippis played a key role in the campaign that led to the Dissenters' Relief Act of 1779, which exempted Nonconformist ministers from subscription to the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles. He wrote extensively on history and theology, contributing regularly to periodicals including the Gentleman's Magazine and the Monthly Review, and publishing biographies of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Captain Cook and others. He was editor-in-chief of the Bibliographia Britannica, an unfinished project to compile a dictionary of national biography, whose first six volumes appeared between 1778 and 1795. Kippis was made a Doctor of Divinity by Edinburgh University in 1767, and became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1788 and of the Royal Society in 1779.
Bunhill Fields was first enclosed as a burial ground in 1665. Thanks to its location just outside the City boundary, and its independence from any Established place of worship, it became London's principal Nonconformist cemetery, the burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake and other leading religious and intellectual figures. It was closed for burials in 1853, laid out as a public park in 1867, and re-landscaped following war damage by Bridgewater and Shepheard in 1964-5.
SOURCES: Corporation of London, A History of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (1902).
A W Light, Bunhill Fields (London, 1915).
Alan Ruston, entry on Kippis in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (retrieved on 13 July 2009).
REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The monument to Andrew Kippis is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* It is a legible late-C18 headstone that commemorates a leading Nonconformist minister, scholar and political campaigner of the period.
* It is located within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (q.v.), and has group value with the other listed tombs in the west enclosure.
