Nunhead, unless you live locally, will register not a flicker of recognition on the average Londoner's expression. No Tube station, stadium, or shopping centre of note - in fact, there are few hooks to snag and categorise this modest area of South London. Except its jewel: Nunhead Cemetery.

Back in the early Victorian Era, London was expanding at an alarming pace. Centre of the British Empire and eye of the industrial storm, everyone and everything gravitated toward London. Commerce meant jobs and the ever-accelerating migration from a rural to an urban lifestyle, with the whole family off to work in the morning. More than anything else, business needed people and London's population like its footprint - was booming. Life expectancy however, was low, which created the straightforward logistical problem of too many dead bodies in the capital. Churchyards were unable to meet the demand and the unsavoury practice of corpse dumping, was having serious health repercussions via infected water supplies (from soil leaching). A parliamentary bill of 1832 ushered in 'private cemeteries' and Nunhead Cemetery (formerly 'All Saints') was one of the initial [magnificent] seven which formed a ring around the periphery of London at the time (Highgate Cemetery is another).

'Burial Grounds' had been introduced by non-conformists in the previous century (like Bunhill Fields, Islington) as alternatives and useful overspills to churchyard burial, which was every parishioner's right. Churchyards also rarely represented the scarcely-believable number of actual burials which occurred beneath their soil. It's estimated that over 70,000 people are buried in the diminutive 200 square-foot (living-room sized) churchyard space, of St Martin in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square.

Named after Sir Flinders Petrie, who held the UK's first chair in Egyptology and the most phonetically pleasing name for a Victorian, gentleman-adventurer, since Sir Rider Haggard. As a child he was disturbed to hear how a Roman Villa was excavated, by crude shovelling - offering his opinion that the earth should be pared back, exposing how the contents lay in their natural state. Lofty thinking for an eight year-old. In his early career he travelled to Egypt and investigated theories about the Great Pyramid at Giza's construction. Petrie produced a raft of practical principles and the basic data he recorded still provides much of the information about the site today. In addition he mentored successive generations of archaeologists in his methods, which later became de facto standards (including seriation: the dating of objects in a serialised manner). Seems obvious, but Petrie got there first - "in like Flinders", springs to mind. Howard Carter, who uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, was heavily influenced in his formative years by Petrie's close tutorship.

Most importantly, he rolled up his sleeves and got involved in the digging - an early adopter of a "back to the floor" policy of management. At an excavation of the New Kingdom site in Tanis, Egypt, he took over the role of foreman and removed the pressure on his diggers to find items as quickly as possible. As such, the earth was 'pared back', as his former, pre-teen self had precociously suggested. This made him popular with his digging crews. It's also pleasing to note that throughout the Petrie Collection in the museum, sepia photographs of his local digging supervisors are placed amongst the finds. He strikes you as someone who shared credit and responsibility among his workforce, rather than simply providing a chest to pin medals to. The chair at University College, London was created in 1892 and Flinders Petrie was the first to hold it. In 1913 he sold his collection to UCL, which is why it's now housed in The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology.