Category Archives: Cemeteries, Sewerage & Sanitation

Burning issue

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Woking Crematorium

Woking Crematorium

In Victorian times there was huge controversy about cremation.  Utilitarian and sanitary arguments against burial were opposed by intransigent clergy. The Bishop of London, John Jackson, complained that cremation would “undermine the faith of mankind in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and so bring about a most disastrous social revolution”. The Bishop of Manchester, James Fraser, responded that God would have no more difficulty resurrecting ashes than dust, or “bodies which had passed into the structure of worms”.

The very occasional cremations that came to public knowledge caused great scandal – Honoretta Brooks Pratt illegally cremated in 1769, Captain T B Hanham who built a private cremator for his wife, his mother and ultimately himself in Dorset – until the wildly eccentric Dr William Price’s cremation of his five-month-old son Iesu Grist in 1884 led to Mr Justice Stephen’s ruling that cremation was not an offence “provided no nuisance was caused”.

The Cremation Society built the first cremator in Britain at Woking in 1879, originally little more than a furnace with a 42ft chimney. They hesitated to use it until the legal ambiguities had been resolved, and the first cremation on the site, 71-year-old Mrs Jeanette Pickersgill, took place on March 26th 1885.

Thereafter a small number of cremations were carried out each year, and in 1891 a chapel and reception rooms designed by Edward Channing Clarke were added in a comfortable thirteenth-century Gothic style that was intended to reassure mourners and hide the functionality of the machinery within.

The relationship between Woking Crematorium and the nearby Brookwood Cemetery was fraught with ambiguity. The Cremation Society bought the land from the London Necropolis Company, but through a third party so that the cemetery company could dissociate itself. Yet in due time the London Necropolis Company provided funeral facilities, including trains from Waterloo, and sold plots for the burial of ashes.

Similarly, the vicar of St Peter’s Church, Woking, Rev Frederick J Oliphant, made an enormous fuss when the crematorium was first proposed, yet by 1889 the Rev William Hamilton, vicar of St John the Baptist, Woking, was conducting frequent funeral services at the crematorium for a fee of one guinea a time and also burying cremated remains in the churchyard at St John’s.

Woking Crematorium is still in use, its buildings cherished for their atmosphere and historical significance, its grounds a beautiful and extensive garden of remembrance:  http://www.thelondoncremation.co.uk/woking-crematorium.

Cremation is now by far the most prevalent form of disposal of the dead: in 2012 only a quarter of disposals were burials.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Some mother’s son

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Unknown serviceman's grave, Kirk Patrick Churchyard, Isle of Man

Unknown serviceman’s grave, Kirk Patrick Churchyard, Isle of Man

My friend John pointed out to me, in the Manx churchyard of Kirk Patrick, a grave to an unknown serviceman, with the motto “Some mother’s son”, a white marble cross inscribed “British – unidentified – interred 27th Feb 1918” and, in tiny lettering at the foot, “Erected by Florrie Forde, 1927”.

Very little seems to be recorded of the circumstances of this story. Florrie Forde (1875-1940) was a hugely famous music-hall singer, Australian by birth, who dominated British variety theatre from the beginning of the twentieth century until the start of the Second World War.

She kept a cottage on the Manx coast at Niarbyl, where this unidentifiable but clearly British serviceman was washed ashore.

Rather than allow him to be buried in obscurity, Florrie wanted to make sure he had a monument, if not a name, as his unknown mother would have wished.

Florrie was entertaining troops when she died in 1940, and her passing was commemorated by the poet Louis MacNeice in ‘Death of an Actress’: http://wordcount-richmonde.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/death-of-actress-i-see-from-paper-that.html.

An ace caff with quite a nice cemetery attached

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Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol: Nonconformist chapel and the chhatri of Raja Rammohun Roy (1772?–1833)

Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol: Nonconformist chapel and the chhatri of Raja Rammohun Roy (1772?–1833)

Arnos Vale Cemetery in Brislington, Bristol, is a superb example of an 1830s company cemetery laid out as an Elysian landscape with fine classical buildings and a rich collection of monuments up to and including the past decade.

The cemetery was designed by the Bristol architect Charles Underwood (1791-1883) and the landscaping, including two thousand ornamental trees and shrubs, was the responsibility of the local nurserymen James Garraway and Martin Hayes (c1801-1858).

The cemetery opened, after the consecration of the Anglican chapel by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, in October 1840. Successive extensions were added from 1855 until the time of the Second World War.

Because military hospitals were concentrated around Bristol in the First World War soldiers and seamen who were wounded in action and died after repatriation came to be buried at Arnos Vale. All these graves are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

To maintain income in the face of changing fashion, the cemetery company built a crematorium, cloister and columbarium, designed by H G Malcolm Laing, around the nonconformist chapel in 1927-9. This was for a time the only crematorium in the South West, and attracted business from far into Devon and Cornwall. Latterly, the equipment became superannuated and was maintained only with difficulty.

By the 1970s the physical and financial condition of the site caused considerable concern, and it took until 2003 for Bristol City Council to take ownership. It is now maintained by the Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust and reopened to the public in May 2010.

Under its new ownership, Arnos Vale has become distinctive among restored Victorian cemeteries for promoting its buildings and amenities. With lottery grants and other funds the lodges and the two chapels have been fully restored: the Anglican chapel is available for religious wedding ceremonies and the Nonconformist chapel is licensed for civil ceremonies: http://www.arnosvale.org.uk/cemetery-services.

At first it may seem odd to get married in a cemetery, but what could be more appropriate than to commit to a life partner – or, for that matter, to name a child – in the presence of ancestors?

And on a daily basis, the tactful glass extension of the Nonconformist chapel provides a superb café, operated by Whisk!, a highly regarded firm of Bristol caterers, where visitors can unwind in glorious Elysian surroundings: http://www.arnosvale.org.uk/atrium-cafe.

A visit to the basement loo provides an opportunity to see the workings of the catafalque and relics of the former crematorium.

The Atrium Café is open every day except Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve.

There’s an attractive account of Arnos Vale by the son and grandson of successive superintendents at http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/30/experience-i-grew-up-in-a-cemetery?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmail?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmail.

 

Nottingham’s Water Palaces 2: Papplewick Pumping Station

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Papplewick Pumping Station, Nottinghamshire

Papplewick Pumping Station, Nottinghamshire

If, while dining in splendour at the Lakeside Restaurant, the former Bestwood Pumping Station outside Nottingham, your imagination wonders how much more splendid the place is than when it was a waterworks, you need only drive up the road to the Papplewick Pumping Station to see a similar installation that was and is even more splendid.

The Papplewick Pumping Station was completed in 1886 after the Waterworks Company was taken over by Nottingham Corporation, and its construction was the responsibility of the engineer Marriott Ogle Tarbotton (1834-1887), who gave Nottingham its sewage system and the present-day Trent Bridge.

The engine house at Papplewick was built of local Bulwell bricks with terracotta and Mansfield stone decorations.  It contains two magnificent James Watt & Co beam engines, which pumped from wells two hundred feet deep.  

Papplewick Pumping Station was given the same elaborate architectural treatment and landscaped grounds as Bestwood, but, apparently because the project cost £55,000, well under the £67,000 budget, it is more richly decorative, with stained glass, carved stone and ornamental brasswork designed around the theme of water and water-creatures.

Brass fish swim between the individually turned bronze water-lilies, reeds and bullrushes that decorate the square faces of the columns supporting the engine-beams and gilded ibis embellish the capitals.

The strong resemblance between the Bestwood and Papplewick buildings may indicate the guiding hand of Thomas Hawksley, who acted as an informal mentor to Marriott Ogle Tarbotton.  A letter from James Watt & Co about the design of the engines asked if they could save time and money by adapting features for Hawksley’s Yarmouth waterworks:  “There is a great similarity and we seem to detect Mr Hawksley’s design and ornamentation in your drawings.”

The sheer magnificence of the interior of Papplewick Pumping Station almost certainly saved the engines when it was decommissioned in 1969.  The Bestwood engines were scrapped without controversy in 1968.  The scrap value of the engines at Boughton Pumping Station further north near Ollerton was assessed in 1970 at £10,000, and the proceeds of that sale helped to set up the Preservation Trust that took over Papplewick Pumping Station and brought it back to life:   Papplewick pumping station: Industrial museum and unique wedding venue in Nottinghamshire.

Opening and steaming dates and times at Papplewick Pumping Station are at Papplewick pumping station: Industrial museum and unique wedding venue in Nottinghamshire – Visit us.

Papplewick Pumping Station features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Temples of Sanitation’.  For further details, please click here.

Nottingham’s Water Palaces 1: Bestwood Pumping Station

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Former Bestwood Pumping Station, Nottinghamshire

Former Bestwood Pumping Station, Nottinghamshire

There can be few more splendid places to dine in Nottinghamshire than the Lakeside Restaurant [http://www.lakesidetower.co.uk/fine-dining-in-nottingham/pump-room-restaurant.html], a spectacular conversion of one of Nottingham’s fine Victorian water-supply pumping stations.

Nottingham was the birthplace of one of the greatest British civil engineers of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hawksley (1807-1893), who specialised in water-supply engineering and served as consulting engineer to the Nottingham Waterworks Company.  He was the first to prove it was feasible to provide twenty-four-hour supply, a convenience that made water-closets fully practical.

He was responsible for managing the huge increase in demand as the population of Nottingham grew in the nineteenth century by tapping the abundant supplies of water held in the Bunter Sandstone that lies beneath the town.

The Bestwood Pumping Station, built in 1869-73, was part of that great project.  The brick engine house was built in thirteenth-century French Gothic style with stone facings.

Its architectural splendour was a gesture towards the 10th Duke of St Albans, from whom the six-acre site was leased.  He had rebuilt his nearby residence, Bestwood Lodge, in 1865, so the pumping-station chimney is contained in a 172-feet-high Venetian Gothic staircase tower which leads to a viewing loggia.

The engines were constructed by Joseph Whitham of Leeds, with a capacity of three million gallons per day, drawn from a well 176 feet deep.  They were replaced by electric pumps in 1964 and dismantled in 1968.

Following a steeplejack’s report that the tower was unsafe because of mining subsidence, plans were announced in 1972 to demolish the historic buildings.

Faced with a public outcry, the chairman of Nottingham Corporation Water Committee, Councillor Len Squires (Labour), complained, “Nobody realised the building had any architectural merit whatsoever until we decided to pull it down.”

When the Nottingham Corporation Waterworks Department was taken over by Severn Trent, Bestwood Pumping Station became derelict, listed but apparently unusable.

In fact, its architectural merit made it a superb location for an upmarket restaurant and wedding venue, with a fitness suite in the former boiler house.

The building reopened as the Lakeside Restaurant in 1997 with a décor strongly reminiscent of Victorian country houses, later replaced by an understated colour scheme of sage green and gold.

The latest refurbishment has transformed the interior to a dramatic black and white scheme with tiny touches of gold that admirably brings out the decorative detail of the Victorian structural ironwork.

The beam floor provides a further function room, the Tower Suite, and the tower will eventually be open once building work is complete.

It’s an indication of the pride that Victorian municipalities took in their utilities that this practical waterworks should so successfully become an elegant place for fine dining.

The former Bestwood Pumping Station features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Temples of Sanitation’. For further details please click here.

Castle for climbing

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Former Green Lanes Pumping Station, now the Castle Climbing Centre, Stoke Newington, London

Former Green Lanes Pumping Station, now the Castle Climbing Centre, Stoke Newington, London

The flat plain of Stoke Newington is the last place anyone would expect to find a castle.

The strange-looking folly at the junction of Green Lanes and Manor Road was built as a water-supply pumping station in 1852-6 by William Chadwell Mylne (1781-1863), the Surveyor of the New River Company from 1810 to 1861, at a cost of £81,500.

The elaborate architectural treatment by Robert William Billings (1813-1874) is said to have been a response to the complaints of local residents in what was then an entirely rural area.

Though the cluster of turrets and buttresses is picturesque, every feature has a function:  the taller of the two towers, 150 feet high, was the boiler-house chimney;  the other tower contained the water-tank and the smaller turret provided staircase access to the roof.  The buttresses housed the three flywheels of the two engines, Lion and Lioness.

The steam engines were replaced by 1936 by a combination of diesel engines and electric pumps, which operated until 1971.

Demolition proposals led to a local outcry, and the building was listed Grade II* but remained unused until 1994 when planning permission was given to turn it into the Castle Climbing Centre [http://www.castle-climbing.co.uk/the-castle-history], which opened the following year.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Mark Firth’s monument

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Sheffield General Cemetery: Mark Firth monument

Sheffield General Cemetery: Mark Firth monument

Mark Firth (1819-1880) was a significant figure in the life of Victorian Sheffield.  His father had been head smelter of the long-established steel manufacturer Sanderson Brothers, but Mark and his brother Thomas Jnr set up their own works in 1842 and ten years later moved to Savile Street, where the Sheffield & Rotherham Railway entered the town along the flat flood-plain of the Don Valley.

Their Norfolk Works quickly built a reputation for building armaments:  indeed, a veritable arms race took place on Savile Street, as Sir John Brown’s Atlas Works next door developed armour plate to resist the Firth company’s shells.  Though John Brown & Co acquired a majority shareholding in Thomas Firth & Sons in 1902, the two companies operated independently until 1930 when they became Thomas Firth & John Brown, commonly known as Firth Brown Ltd.

Mark Firth and Sir John Brown were also domestic neighbours in Ranmoor, up on the western hills away from the smoke and dirt of Sheffield’s east end:  Mark Firth lived at Oakbrook (c1860) and Sir John lived next door at Endcliffe Hall (1863-5).

Mark Firth enlarged Oakbrook in 1875 when he entertained the Prince and Princess of Wales (latterly King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) on their visit to open the 36-acre Firth Park, his gift to the city at Page Hall, just over the hill from the Don Valley.

Mark Firth dominated civic life in the years before Sheffield became a city:  indeed, some of his munificence may have made civic status a possibility.  He served as Master Cutler in 1867 and Mayor in 1874.  As well as Firth Park his name is linked to Firth College, opened in 1879, which ultimately became Sheffield University, and the thirty-six Firth Almshouses at Hangingwater, near to his Ranmoor home.

A modest and devout member of the Methodist New Connexion, he retained his links with his working-class roots to the end of his life.  Travelling daily by carriage from Oakbrook back to the works on Savile Street, he lunched on pies cooked by his foreman’s wife.  He was at the Works when he suffered a fatal stroke.

When he died the whole of Sheffield shut up shop for the day, and the funeral procession from Oakbrook stretched two miles to his grave in the General Cemetery, where his monument is now restored and listed Grade II.

The Firth Almshouses continue to operate as a registered charity [http://www.sheffieldhelpyourself.org.uk/full_search_new.asp?group=17923], and Oakbrook has been part of Notre Dame High School since 1919:  http://www.notredame-high.org.uk/index.php/information/item/161-history-of-notre-dame.

The Sheffield General Cemetery features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Victorian Cemeteries’.  For further details, please click here.

The finest gents in the North West

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Philharmonic Hotel, Liverpool: gentlemen's lavatory

Philharmonic Hotel, Liverpool: gentlemen’s lavatory

One of the great Liverpool experiences is having a drink – or perhaps more than one drink – in the Philharmonic Hotel (1898-1900) on the opposite corner of Hope Street to the Philharmonic Hall from which it takes its name.

This palace of a pub is the result of a partnership of the architect Walter W Thomas and Robert Cain’s Brewery during the great boom in public-house building at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Thomas was well-funded and fortunately placed to call on the formidable design-skills of the Liverpool University School of Architecture and Applied Art and of the Liverpool craftsmen who executed the decorative schemes of the interiors of the great ocean-liners built by Cammell Laird across the Mersey in Birkenhead.

The exterior of the Philharmonic Hotel is an odd combination of Scottish Baronial and Art Nouveau, with elaborate iron gates by the German-American artist H Blomfield Bare, who also designed the repoussé copper panels inside.

The interior scheme was co-ordinated by George Hall Neale and Arthur Stratten, who employed Charles J Allen to produce the distinctive plaster caryatids and atlantes in the billiard room (the former modelled by his friend Mrs Ryan), the Irish plasterer Pat Honan and the stone-carver Frank Norbury.

The gentlemen’s lavatories at the Philharmonic Hotel are not to be missed.  Indeed, the protocol is that any respectable lady customer can ask any respectable gentleman customer to check the coast is clear so she can admire the marble, the mosaic and the brass-work of this palatial pissoir.

John Lennon declared that one of the disadvantages of fame was “not going to The Phil any more”.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Oasis of peace

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St James's Cemetery, Liverpool (1979) – Huskisson Monument in the foreground

St James’s Cemetery, Liverpool (1979) – Huskisson Monument in the foreground

A page of Liverpool City Council’s website [http://liverpool.gov.uk/leisure-parks-and-events/parks-and-greenspaces/st-james-gardens] presents the former quarry below the Anglican Cathedral as an “oasis of peace”, a bland description that matches the 1970s landscaping of one of the city’s most dramatic corners.

The stone for much of eighteenth-century Liverpool was quarried here.  As Mount Zion it was a place of resort, especially after the discovery in 1773 of a chalybeate spring which was thought good for “loss of appetite, nervous disorders, lowness of spirit, headache…proceeding from crudities of the stomach, rickets and weak eyes”.

Renamed St James’s Mount, after the newly-built adjacent parish church, around 1775, it became more genteel.  John Bridge opened “a coffee house of considerable repute…frequented principally by persons of a superior class”.  Visitors relished the contrast between the vast quarry face and the “subterraneous [entrance], supported by arches, [which] has a pleasing and romantic effect”.

When the quarry was practically exhausted in 1825 it became St James’s Cemetery, so immediately profitable that as soon as it opened in 1829 its first year of trading paid an 8% dividend.

The Liverpool architect John Foster Jnr designed a funerary chapel, the Oratory, and built a series of retaining walls, ramps and catacombs into the quarry face.  Mike Faulkner’s informative website [http://www.stjamescemetery.co.uk] provides details of the tunnels that gave access for mourners and hearses.

By the time St James’ Cemetery closed in July 1936, 57,774 burials had taken place.  From that time onwards maintenance became an increasingly severe problem.

The floor of the cemetery was almost entirely cleared by the City Council between 1969 and 1972, isolating John Foster Jnr’s magnificent 1833 mausoleum of the Liverpool MP and President of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson (1770-1830).  Huskisson’s statue by John Gibson has been removed for safety.

Other celebrated Liverpudlians buried here include the architect, John Foster Junior (1786-1846), Sir William Brown (1784-1864), donor of the William Brown Library, and the much-loved Catherine “Kitty” Wilkinson (1786-1860), an Irish-born washerwoman of Denison Street.  She is famous for making her water-boiler available to maintain cleanliness during the 1832 Cholera Epidemic, “indefatigable and self-denying, she was the widow’s friend, the support of the orphan, the fearless and unwearied nurse of the sick, the originator of baths and wash-houses for the poor”.

St James’s Gardens, as it’s now known, provides a green amenity in the midst of the city.

But I miss the Gothick atmosphere of the accumulated gravestones and monuments that filled the quarry floor until 1972.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Necropolis

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Sir Henry Tate Mausoleum, West Norwood Cemetery, London

Sir Henry Tate Mausoleum, West Norwood Cemetery, London

There’s more to West Norwood Cemetery (1837) than meets the eye.  It’s one of the “Magnificent Seven” early-Victorian London cemeteries – the others are Kensal Green (1837), Highgate (1839), Abney Park (1840), Nunhead (1840), Tower Hamlets (1841) and Brompton (1842) – and it has more monuments than you can shake a stick at, 65 of them listed at Grades II and II* according to the Friends’ website:  http://www.fownc.org/.

Perhaps the only disappointment about this beautifully landscaped place is the loss of the original brick mortuary chapels by Sir William Tite, both damaged in the Blitz:  the Anglican chapel was demolished in 1955, and the Nonconformist chapel was replaced by a modern (c1960) crematorium which I thought quite decorous but which Pevsner dismisses as “indifferent”.

Beneath the site of the Anglican chapel the extensive catacombs remain, and can easily be seen at http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/sites/w/west_norwood_cemetery/index.shtml.  The catacombs beneath the dissenters’ chapel were apparently not much used, and were replaced by extensive subterranean cremators from 1915 onwards.

Very early in the history of the cemetery, in 1842, the Greek Orthodox community took a separate plot, on which stands their St Stephen’s Chapel (1872), attributed to John Oldrid Scott, surrounded by its own rich collection of mausolea.

An architectural highlight amongst the wealth of monuments is the Tate Mausoleum, built for Sir Henry Tate (1819-1899), inventor of the sugar cube and founder of the Tate Gallery, by Doulton & Co of Lambeth to the designs of Harold Peto, who enlisted all the richness and crispness that Doulton’s artists could contrive:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WNC_Tate.JPG.  The restoration by R K Conservation & Design’s of the mosaic ceiling is illustrated at http://www.rkconservation.co.uk/projectdetails.php?ID=4.

Having built a monument for the Tate family, Sir Henry Doulton (1820-1897) chose to build his own terracotta mausoleum round the corner:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Doulton_Mausoleum_West_Norwood_Cemetery.jpg.  This is even more elaborate, probably the work of R Stark Wilkinson who built the Doulton factory on the Albert Embankment [see http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/lambeth/lambeth-assets/galleries/lambeth-north/doulton-and-co-1879], with details designed by the company’s artist, Mark Marshall.

Terracotta never caught on as a material for funerary monuments.  I know of only one other, the empty Stearn Mausoleum in Nunhead Cemetery, a few miles to the east:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stearne_mausoleum.JPG.

Norwood Cemetery fell on particularly bad times as its income fell in the twentieth century, even though the company had astutely invested in cremation.  Lambeth Council bought the place in 1965 and initially rode roughshod over the rights of the established grave-owners:  the policy of “lawn conversion” and the destruction of monuments was eventually ruled illegal in the mid-1990s, and the cemetery is now managed more decorously.

Indeed, because the crematorium is fully operational, Norwood Cemetery feels like a place people visit for its intended purpose.

And that, compared with the quieter repose of most of the other “Magnificent Seven” cemeteries, is oddly comforting.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.