Historians portray London’s "Magnificent Seven" suburban cemeteries as the first fruits of the urban health reforms inspired by Edwin Chadwick and George Walker. But all seven cemeteries opened before Chadwick and Walker’s work began. What’s more, the city’s new cemeteries were met with a chorus of protests. Why was this? I remove London’s cemeteries from the narrative of health reforms in which they have been anachronistically placed and study them in their own time. It turns out that financial designs prompted their construction, designs that involved a number of previously unexplored, deleterious consequences. These consequences, which historians have overlooked, were recognized immediately by Londoners of the time. Church revenues waned, public parks were enclosed and developed, and the socio-spatial division between the rich west and the poor east widened. Londoners fought hard against the very same cemeteries that recent historians have anointed as the solution to the city’s health problems.