A man will be walking 20 miles round Epsom and Ewell on Saturday to raise awareness of the abandonment of Horton Cemetery.

Pete Cole, 64, of Horton Hill, will be taking part in the Round the Borough Walk to show his support for the Mayor, Councillor Sheila Carlson, who will also be participating.

The Mayor is dedicated to finding a solution for the cemetery, on Horton Lane, and is fully supportive of the Epsom Guardian’s campaign to Bring Dignity to the Dead at Horton Cemetery. The cemetary, which contains 8,000 former soldiers and hospital patients, is privately owned but has run into a state of disrepair in recent years.

The Epsom Guardian's campaign was prompted after a child discovered a number of bones in the cemetary in April.

Mr Cole, whose late parents worked at Horton Hospital during the 1900s, also supports the campaign and hopes to help the Mayor in her research into the dead buried there.

He said: "It is my wish to raise awareness of the issue and I hope that, from this, we can raise money for Horton Cemetery to bring it back into a reasonable condition. "I love walking and I love the borough and I thought the walk would be a great way to do this.

"My late parents both worked at Horton Hospital and would have known the names of many of those buried there. "Quite a few people who were sent to the hospitals, were from the East End of London, which is where my family originates from.

"I have lived in Horton Hill since 1985 and the road is nicknamed ‘buttons road’ because the staff at the mental hospitals used to wear uniforms with brass buttons on them."

Mr Cole worked at Horton Hospital in 1963, as a sixth form student, who helped out in the kitchens to "make some pocket money". He then worked at Long Grove Hospital, also in the Epsom Cluster, in 1975, helping patients using the skills he learnt while completing an MA in Art Therapy three years before.

He said: "The hospitals are a part of the area I grew up in and ever since I was eight years old I learnt that there was something unique about them. "The architecture of the hospitals was like that of a prison. It was somewhere to put people away from the rest of the community and each hospital cared for people from a different part of London.

"In a way I think that the hospitals were good because they had farms and their own food - asylum had a good meaning. But then the hospitals became somewhere people just got locked away.

"In the world as we know it, so many people suffer with mental health issues and it is good to raise awareness of that. I hope something can be done so as to respect those who suffered physically and mentally in their lives and are buried at Horton Cemetery."