I don’t even like using the word urn to be quite honest,
it just sounds a bit morbid.
This is a piece of my grandmother that I keep with me all the time.
Over the past decade or so, ashes creations have started to appear.
I look at it and I just remember all the good times we had.
In Classical Greece and Rome,
you had both burial and cremation practices taking place.
Of course in other parts of the world, traditional aspects
in Buddhism - again cremation.
Of course the Jews, never cremation, burial normative. Islam, burial.
But of course, long before this India was a cremation culture.
And once Christianity became established in the UK...
...and that continued really until the mid-19th Century
when, with industrialisation and the rise of big towns, big cities,
church yards got full fast.
The miasmas, the gases that were rising from putrefied bodies
were considered to be very unhealthy.
The Cremation Society was founded in 1874 by Sir Henry Thompson
who was a celebrated surgeon.
And he was joined by a number of free thinkers who were drawn
from the realms of medicine, science and the arts.
Price was really a very flamboyant character.
A Welsh nationalist, and self-appointed Archdruid of Wales.
Price was arrested, and sent to trial at Cardiff assizes
where Judge Stephen ruled that cremation was not illegal,
providing it didn’t cause any public nuisance.
So in 1902...
So by the time we get into the 1940s and 50s,
something really interesting was happening.
You were having women dying
who no longer had a husband's grave that they had to go into.
So the issue of choice that cremation was now, as it were, on the cards
and a possibility, and so about the middle of the 1960s,
that Britain flips from being burial majority to cremation majority.
It's really extraordinary that the percentage of deaths that resulted
in cremation in 1939 stood at 3.5%.
And now of course the cremation rate in the UK stands at nearly 80%.
From something like the mid-1970s, the British started doing something
which many people on the continent to this day find weird.
They started taking cremated remains away from the crematorium
and doing their own thing with them.
Just seems weird to call it an urn to me.
I like to think of it as a piece of art
that just happens to have my mum and dad inside it.
This is a piece of my grandmother, my memorial jewellery
that I keep with me all the time.
All ashes creations are about keeping our loved ones close.
Any memorial is for the people left behind.
It's never for the person,
it's for us to carry on with that memorial.
It's allowed the dead to become part of the furniture of our life.
My ashes creation is a tattoo
and in it includes the ashes
of my late partner who passed away two and a half years ago.
A small number of people choose to have ashes mixed into tattoo ink.
He was my friend and I also got a tattoo.
And their bodies are literally mingled together.
As chair of The Cremation Society, I will naturally choose to be cremated.
I think my daughter will have me incorporated into a vinyl record
because I love music, maybe something by the Beastie Boys.
I do not belong to the tattoo generation.
I don’t think there's enough room in there to fit me in with them.