Seventy per cent of British families now choose cremation for their funerals, a rapid change in traditional death customs. This is the first book to investigate why cremation replaced burial. It examines the political, religious, economic and social reasons behind personal choice and sets them in a European context. This study is doubly timely with the expanding scholarly interest in death studies, and the new media interest in the British way of death.

PETER C. JUPP is a United Reformed Church Minister and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, UK. He is a founding editor of the quarterly journal Mortality, Chairman of the Council of the Cremation Society of Great Britain and a non-executive director of the London Cremation Company.