Before he got started in the death business, London’s grooviest undertaker was one of our most enterprising restaurateurs. In the 90s and noughties, as the owner of Coast, Mash and most famously the Atlantic Bar & Grill, he was caterer-in-chief to the Cool Britannia crowd. Before that, he hosted some of the capital’s more glamorous club nights. Now he does funerals to die for. If you were being all cute about it, you might say that going out in style is Oliver Peyton’s speciality.
‘Everyone was slightly freaked out when I said I was going to start a funeral business,’ Peyton tells me. ‘Like, “You’re out of your mind.” I mean, I was freaked out as well.’ Then he realised the connection between feeding people and burying their family members. ‘It’s a hospitality business. It’s about taking care of people. And the funny thing is, the amount of people I’ve done funerals for who used to go to the restaurants is unbelievable. It’s really quite weird.’
I mumble something about being certain there’s no direct causal link between having eaten regularly at Peyton’s restaurants and being, well, dead. But then, it occurs to me, these were hedonistic places. His clientele of media movers and showbiz shakers was not, 30 years ago, overly concerned with such dispiriting notions as ‘wellness’ or ‘longevity.’ Maybe Peyton’s natural progression is, after all, from starry party starter to master of ceremonies at fashionable send-offs?
‘With restaurants,’ he says, ‘I always tried to do something no one had done before. With funerals it’s far more challenging. It’s a completely undisrupted business, because it’s hard to do. You have to build trust. It takes time. You’ve got to have long pockets. So breaking the mould is something I’m very proud of.’
We’re talking on a Wednesday morning at the first of his three funeral parlours. Exit Here opened in 2019 on a leafy corner of west London’s Chiswick High Road, with a mission to shake up a business largely unchanged since Victoria waved off Albert for the final time. Today the deceased can also schedule departures in Crouch End and Chelsea. This year Exit Here will do about 350 funerals.
The Chiswick branch is giving Beverly Hills art gallery rather than your local Undertaker & Sons. It’s not black. There are no ruched curtains or pastel floral displays or gloomy sample tombstones. The colour scheme is white and blue, the shopfront sports floor-to-ceiling windows and a handwritten neon sign glows above the door. A coffin rests in the corner, decorated in the style of the Mexican Day of the Dead. So pleasant is the atmosphere, something almost approaching jolly, that one must remind oneself that the mortuary out back has storage for 14 corpses.
If the cartoon of a funeral director is a sombre figure in a top hat and tails, stiff as rigor mortis, Peyton’s here to disrupt that, too. An effervescent Irishman with a coat-hanger physique, high-voltage hair and main-character glasses, he crackles at 64 with the enthusiasm of a man 40 years his junior.
The UK funeral market is dominated by three ‘corporates’: Co-op Funeralcare, Dignity Group and Funeral Partners. Between them they own around 1,800 funeral homes. ‘It’s a conveyor belt,’ Peyton says, sipping coffee. ‘It’s a transport business.’ Funeral directors shift bodies, he suggests, as efficiently as possible from mortuary to coffin to urn or grave. Without, perhaps, paying close attention to individual tastes and requirements. In a word, Peyton says, the British funeral is ‘perfunctory.’ It typically fails to capture anything close to the character, let alone the spirit, of the deceased.
