Coffins have had a place in funerals for thousands of years and still play an important part in most funeral services. The huge range of coffins available means that it is possible to consider your loved one’s final wishes, from eco-friendly materials to custom colours and designs.
No one, not even Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, can live forever. Celebrating her official birthday last weekend, the Queen is now 93 and the plans for her eventual passing are firmly in place.
With evidence of burial traditions dating back throughout the ages, taking care of the deceased remains part of our culture today despite changes in funeral traditions. But why do we do we have funerals?
Many people choose to introduce some personal touches alongside the more traditional elements of their funeral service. But for some, nothing less than a truly unique send-off will do.
Burials are not as popular in the UK as they once were, but the 140,000 burials every year reflect a long history of burials in Britain.
Just 2% of cremations in 2018 were direct, but that number is expected to rise quickly as a number of factors combine to make direct cremation more attractive.
A memorial creates a focus for memories but with less burials, people are looking for new ways to ensure that their loved ones are remembered.
There are two important venues involved with most funerals: The venue for the service and the venue for the wake. Both should be right for you.
Digital technology sometimes gets a bad press, but it has come to play an important role before, during and after family funerals.
Talking more about death is a good thing, but there is a clear difference between encouraging private, purposeful conversations around the fulfillment of final wishes and idle banter that risks disrespecting the bereaved.
At £4,798, the average cost of a burial is more than £1,000 higher than the average cost of a cremation.
For some people, the answer to rising prices and lengthy waiting times is direct cremation, with an average cost of £1,712, £2,032 less than a standard cremation and £2,559 less than the average funeral according to SunLife.
They say change is the only constant and that applies to funerals as much as anything else – several long-established traditions continued to give way to personal choice in many of the funerals held last year
We take the idea of cremation very much for granted in modern day Britain, but less than 150 years ago, there were virtually no cremations carried out in the United Kingdom.
To mark 100 years since the end of the First World War, Golden Charter is sharing some of the Thank You stories sent to us by members of our network of independent funeral directors.
Items like tea bags, tissues, and daylight savings have become part of our daily life, but we rarely give any thought to their wartime heritage. To thank the First World War’s pioneers and recognise the innovations they made we have compiled a list of five inventions for which conflict was crucial in their development.
With many of the dead buried on the battlefields people needed a focus for their grief after the First World War and memorials were erected across the UK in the ‘greatest wave of remembrance this nation has ever seen’.
Just like the cost of living, the cost of dying can vary greatly depending on your location and research shows huge variations in the prices paid for funerals across the regions of the UK.
