IT USED to be relatively simple: a black hearse, a wooden coffin and a graveside ceremony were among the hallmarks of the traditional British funeral.

Now, however, the churchyard increasingly is being bypassed as Britons search for ever more creative farewells for their loved ones.

Unconventional alternatives to the usual service include shooting the deceased’s ashes into the air in a firework or having their remains turned into artificial coral reefs.

One company in Hove, Sussex, charges £11,000 to extract the carbon from a sample of ashes to create a memorial diamond. Another company will, for a similar fee, fuse a sample of the deceased’s DNA with that of a tree in order for the dead to “live on”.

Of the 600,000 people who die in Britain each year, 70 per cent are cremated. The move away from churchyard burials started after the Second World War because of lack of space and was compounded after 1963 when the Pope lifted the ban on cremation among Roman Catholics.

Now, the bereaved are increasingly turning their back on what they perceive to be “conveyor-belt” burials or cremations in search of ceremonies that they feel reflect the personality of a friend or family member. Environmental considerations have prompted others to search for non-polluting alternatives to cremation.

One process due to become available in Britain within two years involves freeze-drying the body before shattering it into a powder. Promessa Organics, a Swedish company, has the blessing of the Home Office, environmentalists and the Church of England with its fumeless body disposal technique, in which the dead are dipped in liquid nitrogen and then reduced to a powder by means of vibration. The resulting substance is placed in a biodegradable casket.

Another method, pioneered by Gordon Kaye, a professor at Albany Medical College in New York, breaks human remains down in alkaline hydrolysis “digesters” to a phial of sterile liquid and a powdery bone residue. The process is permitted in three American states and it is hoped that funeral homes will soon be able to use it themselves.

David Prendergast, of the sociology department at the University of Sheffield, who is conducting research into how people dispose of ashes, said that evidence suggested that Britons are becoming more unorthodox in dealing with death.

“With 70 per cent of the population cremated rather than buried, it can be argued that we have the conditions necessary for private, more personalised forms of death ritual,” Dr Prendergast said. “Anecdotal evidence confirms this, along with reports of informal memorialising at sites of deaths and a market for personalised mortuary products.”

Among the many companies latching on to the trend is LifeGem, whose British office opened in Hove earlier this year. The company charges from £11,000 to create a diamond from human ashes.

David Hampson, the managing director, claims that the process is a “21st-century version of Victorian mourning jewellery, of chopping off a piece of hair and putting it in a locket”.

Gayle Tandy, a crime analyst, had a diamond ring created from the remains of her father, a geologist. She said: “I see it as a way of keeping Dad close and this means he can be with me when I walk down the aisle and when I have my first baby.”

Other families have had the ashes of the deceased memorialised by Eternal Reefs, a company that moulds human remains into commemorative artificial reefs before dropping them off the coast of Florida to become “permanent living legacies”. Relatives who scuba dive can pay their respects.

Mike Smith, 46, an artist from Devon, is offering to make paintings of cremated remains, having experimented with cigarette ash.

A more dramatic alternative is to launch the ashes of a loved one into the sky by means of either a shotgun or a giant firework. Joanna Booth had the ashes of her husband, a former Sotheby’s gun specialist, mixed with shot for a shooting party on a Scottish estate.

In Edinburgh, friends of a man who died from cancer in his mid-20s had his ashes mixed with gunpowder and “launched” him over the city in a series of rockets this year.

The writer Philip Pullman had a firework company make up a consignment of 40 rockets from his stepfather’s ashes.

Although traditional inhumations had until recently waned in popularity, eco-friendly woodland burials, where graves are marked by a shrub or tree, have begun to reverse that trend. Stephanie Wienrich, a spokeswoman for the Natural Death Centre, said: “Many people prefer a living memorial such as some wild flowers or a tree.”

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