The Burial Act 1852 created and empowered Burial Boards to provide cemeteries for the interment of those living within their parish. Financed by the fees from those interred, a higher non-parishioner charge was levied on those desirous of utilising the cemetery but not living within the Board’s boundary. Research has identified that although non-parishioner status remains today (and is now known as ‘non-resident’ burial), its intended purpose of preserving burial space through the deterrent of a higher charge has been subjected to wide interpretation. […]

‘He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.’ This statement of the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom James Harold Wilson in 1967, exemplifies the most common perception of cemeteries as being insusceptible to change. But cemeteries are not ahistoric places and like any other human institutions they are exposed to changing socio-cultural, demographic, political, and economic parameters to which they are bound to respond. […]

This paper examines the history of the convent cemetery of the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre, and associated changes to death, dying and burial practices within the community – physically, spiritually and culturally. Founded in Liège in 1642, where they lived as an English convent in exile for some 150 years, the Sepulchrines were forced to migrate from mainland Europe to England in 1794 as a result of revolutionary changes sweeping the continent. After arrival in England, […]

Archaeology students recorded one of the areas in Toxteth Park Cemetery as part of their archaeology field methods module. This paper described the process and assesses preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of this activity both as a pedagogic experience and as a contribution the recording and long-term management of the cemetery. Toxteth Park, as with most cemeteries in Liverpool, is managed by the local authority but is also supported by a friends’ group; it is listed on Historic England’s Parks and Gardens Register. […]

The cemetery and churchyard commonly present problems with maintenance issues, contentious memorialisation sensibilities, economics and allowing for an evolution of rituals and customs. If architecture began with the tomb, has the story line for cemetery design been lost along the way? This landscape interface between mortality and immortality could be seen as it has in the past, as the greatest design brief of all, but current design ethos is surely falling short. Is this landscape a place of exclusive use for the visiting bereaved and has it been so in the past? […]

George Alfred Walker was one of the very first sanitary reformers to be actively involved in the burial reform debate which took place in the 1840s in England. Although historical interest in Walker is not new, most historical works have focused on the sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick. There are only a few academic articles specifically dedicated to Walker, and yet such articles never offer a thorough analysis of Walker’s contribution to the burial debate—although Peter Jupp had been calling for it since 1997 (The Changing Face of Death). […]

The young, beautiful and rich widow Giertrud Birgitte Bodenhoff was buried in Assistens cemetery, Copenhagen on 23 July 1798 but was she dead? Family stories claimed she had been buried alive but unconscious (skindød in Danish) from an excess of opium. They suggest that when grave robbers opened her coffin to steal her jewellery, she woke up and they killed her to conceal their crime. An exhumation on the 9 January 1953 took place to investigate the stories. […]

This paper will be delivered as an illustrated talk, using contemporary and historical images of St George’s Field and images of the artwork I have made in response to it. St George’s Field is now a disused cemetery within the grounds of Leeds University. Using Barthes Camera Lucida as a theoretical starting point and an interdisciplinary approach, it will contain an overview of St George’s Fields rich historical and social narrative and  will concentrate upon its transformation from farmland to cemetery to public park during the last two hundred years.  […]

In 2016, the Scottish Government updated the laws governing burial and cemetery management. The previous primary legislation, drafted in 1855, enshrined the ability to purchase burial rights in perpetuity. The 2016 act enables grave reuse and seeks to clarify procedures for burial authorities to deal with ‘ownerless’ graves and gravestones, many of which are historic in date. Local communities tend to perceive historic burial grounds as different from their ‘modern’ counterparts by virtue not only of their age but also by their incapacity to provide new burial space and it can be argued that this has resulted in a more ready acceptance of their greenspace and heritage values. […]