An eclipse read through seven graves in Bow

The best instrument for watching a partial eclipse is not a telescope. It is a tree.

A leaf canopy is a field of thousands of small irregular gaps, and each one works as a pinhole camera. On an ordinary afternoon they project overlapping discs of the sun onto the ground, which read as dappled light. During an eclipse each disc becomes a crescent — and a whole woodland floor turns into a projection of what is happening overhead.

What happened at the cemetery park

On the evening of 12 August, the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park ran an Eclipse Walk through the park in east London. A few minutes after 7pm, the sun’s projections through the canopy shifted from circles into scattered crescents across the grass.

Participants also used eclipse glasses, pinhole cameras, colanders and perforated spoons — each of which does the same job as the canopy, with fewer holes.

Seven graves as a route

The walk was designed by Dr Mayanka Mukherji, Heritage Projects Lead at the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, who connected seven 19th-century graves to themes of light and the sun.

Among those whose graves the route passes: William Henry Perkin, the chemist; Lucy Atkinson, the explorer; Clara Grant, known as the «Bundle Woman of Bow»; and Elizabeth Best, a leader of the 1888 matchgirls’ strike.

The walk also drew on eclipse stories from a range of cultures — the explanations people reached for before the mechanism was understood.

Why a cemetery is the right room for this

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park stopped being a working burial ground long ago and became something rarer in inner east London: seven and a half hectares of woodland that nobody cleared. That woodland is what made the projection work, and the graves under it are what gave the evening its second subject.

It is a good example of what a local heritage group can do that a science centre cannot — hold an astronomical event and a neighbourhood’s nineteenth century in the same ninety minutes, on foot.