Zion Graveyard, Attercliffe, Sheffield (April 2021)
The lockdown was kind to the Zion Graveyard, Attercliffe’s only historic site that’s also a wildlife sanctuary. Eighteen months of quiet enabled the plants and animals to flourish in peace and the Friends who maintain it could, despite the constraints of lockdown and social distancing, restore the place so that it once again looks like a graveyard rather than a jungle.
The difference they’ve made to a long-neglected, significant historic site is impressive.
The Friends of Zion Graveyard was formed in 2017 by the group who look after Upper Wincobank Undenominational Chapel, a couple of miles away. They wanted to locate the burial place of the Chapel’s founder, Mary Ann Rawson (1801-1887), an energetic anti-slavery campaigner and social reformer, and found it deep in the neglected burial ground of the former Zion Congregational Church, which was burnt down in 1987.
They’re a small, energetic group who’ve achieved a great deal through their enthusiasm and their ability to secure funds from such organisations as the Heritage Lottery Fund and the J G Graves Charitable Trust to supplement the donations of individuals and small businesses associated with the Lower Don Valley.
I’m looking forward to bringing the next Bus Ride Round Attercliffe to Zion Graveyard for a brief visit on Father’s Day, Sunday June 18th 2023.
I like my tours to include the “Heineken effect”, reaching the parts that other tours don’t reach.
I was particularly pleased when a professional architect guest on my ‘Pugin and the Gothic Revival’ tour in September 2019 remarked that he’d been on a previous Pugin tour but I’d taken him to two places he’d never visited before.
One was Alton Castle, normally inaccessible to the public because its use as a retreat for Catholic school pupils involves strict safeguarding rules. We were allowed an hour between school groups departing and arriving to see Pugin’s interiors.
The other was the spectacular Chapel in the ruins of the house at Alton Towers.
I’d never seen this space, and thanks to the theme park’s Corporate Events team we were able to visit another rarely accessible Pugin interior.
The chapel was designed in 1832-33 by Thomas Fradgley, Joseph Ireland and Joseph Potter of Lichfield for the devout Catholic 16th Earl of Shrewsbury. The nave is 90 feet long, 30 feet wide and 60 feet high. It has a slender tower with ogee windows and pinnacles that were reduced in height in the 1950s.
Augustus Welby Pugin brightened the Chapel in 1839-40 with carved and painted panels, some of medieval date from Magdalen College, Oxford – and a new reredos and altar.
Later, in 1850, he decorated the previously plain ceiling in blue, red and gold and added a frieze with Latin texts painted on canvas.
The angels on the roof corbels are plaster (which Pugin would be unlikely to have countenanced) but after he had designed the reredos and altar screen in 1839-40 he is known to have been “fixing figures in the chapel gallery” in 1840 and supervised the decoration of the ceiling between 1849 and 1851.
The sixteenth Earl inherited a personal estate of £400,000 from his uncle. At one point he was spending £20,000 a year on building and restoring churches across his many estates.
When he died in 1852 the title passed to his invalid nephew, Bertram, who himself died without an heir four years later. At his death the estate amounted to some 50,000 acres, the income from which was in excess of £50,000.
There followed a legal dispute about the succession of the titles and estates, in the course of which the contents of Alton Towers were auctioned over a period of a twenty-nine days in 1857.
The property eventually passed to a distant Protestant member of the family, Henry, Earl Talbot of Ingestre, who became the 18th Earl of Shrewsbury.
The altar and reredos were removed in 1860 from the Chapel to St Peter’s Catholic Church, Bromsgrove where they remain; most of the other Pugin work was stripped out in 1951 and only fragments remain.
The eighteenth Earl was the first to open the gardens to the public in 1860. By the 1890s the annual August grand fêtes were attracting crowds of up to 30,000, mainly brought by train to Alton station.
His grandson, the twentieth Earl, died in 1921, and three years later the Alton Towers estate was sold to a business consortium, Alton Towers Ltd, which ran the estate as a tourist attraction and place of entertainment until the War.
The house was requisitioned as an Officer Cadet Training Unit, and when the owners regained possession in 1951 the dilapidations were such that they chose to strip almost the entire interior of lead roofs and internal timber.
The grounds were reopened to the public in 1952.
From 1958 to 1993 the Chapel interior was obscured by a tented ceiling, beneath which spread a gigantic model railway.
The collapse of a beam on to the Chapel floor in 1993 prompted a full structural and decorative restoration of the ceiling in 1994.
Since the late 1990s further conservation programmes have restored some parts of this exceptional building, but the owners’ priority is inevitably to encourage visitors looking for thrills and spills on amusement-park attractions.
I was particularly grateful to the Alton Towers management for allowing my tour-group to see parts of the ruins that other groups can’t reach.
The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Pugin and the Gothic Revival’ tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 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.
St Michael-in-the-Hamlet Church, Aigburth, Liverpool
John Cragg (1767-1854) was not a pleasant man.
I know of only one observation by any of his contemporaries, which simply states that he was “a remarkable man to whom I cannot find a single gracious allusion on anybody’s part”.
His claim to posterity’s attention is that, as the proprietor of the Mersey Iron Foundry, he collaborated with the architect Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) in designing and producing iron components with which to construct prefabricated Gothick churches and other buildings.
Their first project was the parish church of St George, Everton (1812-14).
Even before the completion of St George’s, John Cragg had resolved to make further use of his architectural mouldings to Rickman’s designs, apparently without consulting the architect.
Cragg purchased land in Aigburth not far from the River Mersey in February 1813, and by June 1815 had completed the church of St Michael-in-the-Hamlet.
The essential difference between these two churches is the more adventurous use of materials.
At Aigburth, the framework of the whole structure is iron, filled with a slate base and brick walls, a device patented by John Cragg in 1813.
All the embellishments of the brick walls are of iron – window and door frames, tracery, pinnacles, dripstones and copings. Originally the exterior ironwork was painted to resemble stone, and the brickwork stuccoed to match.
The roof and interior ceilings and panelling are of slate set in iron frames. The moulding of the clerestory windows is also used for a fireplace at the foot of the staircase to the original organ gallery at the west end.
The total outlay using the moulds from St George’s came to £7,865.
Cragg went on to use some of his mouldings yet again in a group of five houses he built, one as his residence and the others as a speculation, around the church to form St Michael’s Hamlet.
St Michael’s was restored by the Liverpool architect brothers William James Audsley (1833-1907) and George Ashdown Audsley (1838-1925) in 1875.
When increasing population demanded an extension to the church in 1900 the north aisle was doubled in width, making sympathetic use of the original decorative features.
The clock was added in 1920 as a war memorial, along with a dedicatory window and wall-tablets.
In the chancel lies a memorial slab commemorating the Herculaneum Pottery Benefit Society, dated 1824:
Here peaceful rest the POTTERS turn’d to Clay
Tir’d with their lab’ring life’s long tedious day
Surviving friends their Clay to earth consign
To be re-moulded by a Hand Divine!
St Michael-in-the-Hamlet was extensively restored in the 1980s, and is now a Grade I listed building.
Its founders and the successive generations of teetotal worshippers would be appalled, but Grade II listing protects the historic fabric, and the income from customers has guaranteed that the building is well maintained.
There were Methodists in Sheffield almost from the very start of John Wesley’s great crusade, and they built a succession of modest chapels from 1741 until the Carver Street building was opened in 1805 at a cost of about £4,720 to seat 1,500 people to the designs of the architect-minister Rev William Jenkin (1788-1844).
The plain but imposing building was described by the Sheffield poet and hymn-writer James Montgomery (1771-1854) as “one of the best planned, most elegant and commodious places of worship in the country”.
Services were often packed to capacity, and the congregation spilled over into the yard outside.
Sheffield was a predominantly nonconformist town: in 1841, when the population was 112,492, the nonconformists had 25,000 sittings, a third of them free, in comparison with the Anglicans’ 1,500.
The Methodists were strict and ascetic in their private lives and public worship. The first Methodist Conference at Carver Street in 1805 passed a resolution prohibiting the use of musical instruments in worship “except a bass viol, which was permitted when the principal singer required it”.
The Carver Street congregation was strict but not rigid. When the chapel was refurbished in 1839, with new pews and double-glazed windows, an organ was inaugurated by the organist of Doncaster Parish Church, Jeremiah Rogers, “who on that occasion performed some of Bach’s organ music for the first time in Sheffield”.
The congregation flourished for 150 years. Its prestigious members included the ironfounder Henry Longden (1754-1812), who is buried in a vault at Carver Street, the steelmaker Alderman George Senior (1838-1915) of Pond’s Forge, Lord Mayor in 1901, and Sir Samuel Osborn (1864-1952), Lord Mayor in 1912.
The premises were repeatedly extended, by a schoolroom in the yard (1834), vestries at the rear of the building (1883) and a new block of schools and classrooms, at a cost of £5,000 in 1897.
The church was reseated in 1902 and a new organ by the Hull manufacturers Forster & Andrews was installed. It cost £1,200, the gift of Samuel Meggitt Johnson (1836-1925) of Endcliffe Court, sole proprietor of the George Bassett confectionery company.
The congregation continued to thrive between the wars: in 1934 the adult membership was 550 and the Sunday Schools had 900 on roll.
The Institute was wrecked in the December 1940 Blitz, and the church itself suffered damage, yet the community played a significant part in the war effort, and was still flourishing at the time of its sesquicentenary in 1955.
By the 1970s, however, there was a decline in numbers, and in 1990 the congregation combined with that of the demolished Wesley Methodist Church in Broomhill and occupied a new building on that site in 1998.
The Carver Street building was sold and converted into a pub, in which the paraphernalia of a modern bar sits incongruously in the intact surroundings of the Grade II-listed galleried chapel, with the pulpit occupied by the DJ’s desk, and the organ intact but mothballed behind. The graves outside are protected by timber cladding. The entire pub-conversion is reversible, so that in future the space can be restored to its original elegance and the building put to another use: https://www.walkaboutbars.co.uk/sheffield.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2017 ‘Sheffield’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 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.
It’s difficult to visualise the hatred and vituperation that poisoned the nineteenth-century Church of England as clergy and their congregations attacked each other’s beliefs about worship.
High-Church Anglo-Catholics, who sought to move closer to Roman Catholicism, fought holy wars with strongly Protestant Low-Church Evangelicals over matters of ritual.
In Sheffield, the focus of Anglo-Catholicism was St Matthew’s Church, Carver Street (Flockton & Son 1854-5), from the arrival of the third vicar, Rev George Campbell Ommanney (1850-1936), in 1882 until his death, both for his pastoral strengths as the “People’s Priest”, resident among parishioners in a congested slum area, and for promoting Anglo-Catholic worship in the town.
Fr Ommanney came into immediate conflict with his predecessor’s churchwarden, Walter Wynn, and their disputes led to brawls in the vestry, court-cases and representations to the Archbishop, William Thompson, until eventually a commission of Sheffield clergy backed Ommanney’s right to minister as he thought fit.
St Matthew’s did not receive episcopal visits until the 1930s because of alleged illegal practices such as the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. Yet, the second Bishop of Sheffield, Leslie Stannard Hunter, appointed in 1939, described Fr Ommanney as “that great man of God”.
As well as upsetting the sensibilities of the predominant Evangelical Anglicans in Sheffield, and caring devotedly for the inhabitants of the surrounding streets, Father Ommanney found the means and the artists to embellish his church.
The chancel was extended by the Arts & Crafts architect and designer John Dando Sedding (1838-1891) in 1886: the reredos, to Sedding’s design, was carved by the Sheffield sculptor Frank Tory (1848-1939), with a painting of the Adoration by Nathaniel Westlake (1833-1921).
J D Sedding also designed the altar, crucifix and candlesticks, and the processional cross which was made in 1889 by Henry Longden & Co, bearing a figure of Christ by Edward Onslow Ford (1852-1901) and figures of the Virgin Mary and St John by Richard Arthur Ledward (1857-1890).
The choir stalls were designed by Sedding’s partner Henry Wilson (1864-1934). The font and the pulpit (both 1903) were designed by H I Potter and carved by Frank Tory with Art Nouveau copperwork by Henry Longden.
The east window was apparently designed by Fr Ommanney. Westlake’s partnership, Lavers, Barraud & Westlake, designed the west window, installed in 1902.
St Matthew’s escaped the Blitz but was damaged by fire shortly after the completion of a restoration programme, in August 1956. The diocesan architect, George Gaze Pace (1915-1975), undertook a further restoration and over a period of ten years the congregation raised a total sum of £15,000 to put the building in order.
The revival of the parish was threatened by a 1970s road-widening scheme. The City Council promised a replacement building on a fresh site, but the plan was shelved and the 1854 church remains, having been listed Grade II in 1973.
The area was redeveloped as the Devonshire Quarter, a lively mixture of retail, pubs and restaurants and apartments.
Although the parish entirely lost its residential community in the post-war period it has retained a congregation attracted by the continuing Anglo-Catholic character of its worship: http://www.stmatthewscarverstreet.co.uk.
St Matthew’s installed an outstanding organ by Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn in 1992 and the building underwent a further major restoration, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, in 2000.
The adjacent Grade-II listed clergy house attracted a European Community grant in 2012 and has been redesigned as The Art House, opened in 2016, to provide work- and exhibition-space for local artists and community groups.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2017 ‘Sheffield’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 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.
I was delighted to read, in the Methodist Church periodical The Connexion (Summer 2020), that Firth Park Methodist Church has put its attractive and expensive building to good use to ensure its long-term survival.
The Grade-II listed building is an essay in Perpendicular Gothic style by the Sheffield architects Frank W Chapman (1869-1933) and John Mansell Jenkinson (1883-1965), built of red brick with ashlar dressings and a slate roof. Its entrance front has a wide Perpendicular window, with twin turrets and a porch with twin entrance doors. The sides of the nave are buttressed and its roof carries an octagonal flèche.
It cost £4,000, of which £1,000 was bequeathed by John Cole, one of the three Cole Brothers who founded the city-centre department store.
The interior plan of the worship space was originally cruciform, with transepts and a chancel.
The foundation stone was laid on Saturday May 28th 1910, and the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of that date mentioned that the building would accommodate a congregation of three hundred and the ancillary facilities included a church parlour, minister’s vestry, choir vestry and kitchen.
The church opened on May 11th 1911. It was affiliated to the United Methodist Church until the 1932 amalgamation which created the modern Methodist Church.
I’ve been told that in the early 1960s a property developer offered the congregation a deal whereby in exchange for the corner site on Stubbin Lane and Sicey Avenue, a brand-new chapel would be incorporated into a proposed supermarket.
The Methodists turned down this offer and instead the unlovely Paragon Cinema (1934), fifty yards up Sicey Avenue, was replaced by a supermarket and bowling alley.
Maintaining the building became increasingly difficult in the decades that followed, and a suspended ceiling was installed circa 1980 to make the place easier to heat.
As the Anglican congregation at St Hilda’s declined, there was talk of amalgamating in order to use one building instead of two, but when eventually St Hilda’s closed in 2007 the remaining members transferred to the Anglican parish church of St James & St Christopher, Shiregreen.
The Methodist congregation continued to flourish, however, and nowadays includes people of Caribbean heritage and from a number of African nations, especially Ghana, and former refugee families from Thailand. The former vestry now serves as a café and is used for Café Church.
To support its thriving programme of activities – youth groups, English as a Second Language groups, an entertainment group – the congregation visualises creating two separate spaces in the nave, and in February 2020 opened ‘Sam’s Space’, containing a substantial indoor soft play structure. In the five weeks before the pandemic lockdown forced it to close, an encouraging number of visitors crossed the threshold.
Sam’s Space isn’t only for kids. Rev Mark Goodhand’s article in The Connexion comments,–
It’s a meeting place for young children, parents, grandparents and carers. It’s a space that outside of soft play sessions will be used for wider conversations – fellowship groups, local councillors’ surgeries and school curriculum work. As the project has unfolded new opportunities for service have emerged. We hope to be involved with mental health work by using an open area attached to our building to provide raised beds for gardening. It’s a place where new expressions of worship will begin to be shaped by the community. This is exciting!
Every church is, of course, essentially the people who meet. The building is only bricks and mortar.
But it’s satisfying that – thanks to the vision of the Firth Park Methodists – the humdrum shopping centre of Firth Park will retain its only distinguished building.
Anglican Cathedral of St John the Evangelist, Parramatta, New South Wales, AustraliaSt Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia
One of my resolutions on my 2017 visit to Sydney was to make the most of the network of ferries across the harbour, and I decided to take one of the two longest trips, to Parramatta.
I had no great hopes of Parramatta – a settlement founded in the same year as Sydney itself, 1788, in the hope of establishing a farm away from the unproductive soil of the coastal area. I enjoyed the ferry, and on the strength of a free street-map of Parramatta I walked up river to find St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral which was a great surprise.
From the outside it looks an entirely conventional Gothic revival church of parochial size dated 1854, distinguished only by its tower and spire which is later, 1880. The entrance is located at the east end, and within is a breathtakingly modern chapel with brilliant white walls, built within the original shell and the nave arcade. The old cathedral was burnt down in 1996, and the shell now serves as a prelude for the new cathedral, designed by Romaldo Giurgola of MGT Architects, built at right angles to the liturgical north, an open-plan space with much modern sculpture and glass, and a Norman & Beard organ brought from St Saviour’s, Knightsbridge and rebuilt here in 2005. Outside is a monument to Pope John Paul II, a sculptural group featuring the Pope with four young people by Linda Klarfeld.
I walked to the opposite end of Church Street, where stands the Anglican Cathedral of St Johnthe Evangelist, built in 1852-5 in Romanesque style – unusual in Australia – and distinguished by earlier twin towers with spires of c1820 based on the ruined church of St Mary at Reculver in Kent, which was reputedly the last English church the Governor’s wife, Elizabeth Macquarie, saw as she set off for Australia. Almost all the woodwork in this dark, warm building is in the Romanesque style, except the font, which is a gift from the Māori people of New Zealand, carved by the Māori craftsman Charles Tuaru in 1966-9.
I returned to Sydney by train from Parramatta station, on a suburban double-deck train which gives good views of the passing suburbs. When the train drew into Lidburne station I remembered it was where on a previous visit I’d got off to explore Rookwood Cemetery, the destination of trains from the Mortuary Station next to Central. And sure enough, as we drew out of the station I spotted a siding that turns away from the main line and points across the road to the gap in the graves where the trains used to run.
At the bottom of Park Road, Dingle, in south Liverpool, the main road makes a sudden, unexpected S-bend which can only represent a very ancient land-boundary.
It’s no accident that the inside of the bend is occupied by an ancient burial ground.
And the chapel within has been known as the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth for almost two hundred years.
At the start of the seventeenth century, Dingle was an isolated settlement two miles away from the town of Liverpool, then still huddled around its neglected medieval castle.
The early history of British Nonconformity goes back to a time barely a generation after the turmoil of the Tudor Reformation, when people acted in ways that are now difficult to recognise, and one of the oddities of the religious conflicts of the time was that Sir Richard Molyneux, 1st Baronet (1560-1662), as a member of a Catholic family sympathetic to victims of religious persecution, allowed Puritan families to occupy land that he had purchased within the medieval Toxteth Park.
In 1611 a group of farmers built a school and Anglican chapel for Puritan worship there and enlisted a fifteen-year-old youth from Winwick, near Warrington, Richard Mather (1596-1669), as master. He came to Toxteth soon after his sixteenth birthday, spent a few months studying at Brasenose College, Oxford, before starting work as preacher and teacher in November 1612 and taking holy orders a few months later.
The Archbishop of York’s inspectors suspended him early in 1634 because he had never worn a surplice in the past fifteen years. Their report declared that “it had been better for him that he had begotten seven bastards”.
He emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts in 1635, became a noted preacher in New England, where four of his five sons graduated at Harvard University and took orders. His son and grandson were respectively presidents of Harvard and Yale Universities. Among his later descendants, eighty became clergymen.
The early congregation included the astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks (1618-1641), who is credited with demonstrating that the Moon moved in an elliptical orbit round the Earth, and was one of the first to observe the Transit of Venus in 1639, which enabled him to estimate the size of the planet Venus and the distance between the Earth and the Sun. He has a memorial in the Chapel, though it’s uncertain whether he was buried there.
By 1662, after the Restoration of King Charles II, Toxteth Chapel was served by two Presbyterian ministers, Thomas Crompton and Michael Briscoe, who were formally licensed under the Royal Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, making the Chapel a Presbyterian place of worship.
Through the following century the Chapel was alternately enlarged and neglected, until it was partly rebuilt in 1774 by those of its congregation who chose to become Unitarian.
The colonnaded “Colybarium” contains monuments dating from 1795 onwards to the Holt, Rathbone, Melly and Holland families, and the porch was added in 1841.
The interior, with its pulpit and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century galleries, was archaic by that time, and was spared Victorian embellishment.
It is listed Grade I because, according to the list description, “As a chapel which was Nonconformist before 1660, and preserves an excellent set of furnishings which were complete by a century later, this chapel is of the highest importance”.
For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.
On my second day in Hiroshima I bought a slightly more
expensive streetcar-and-ferry pass, and in the morning travelled down tram
route 2 all the way to the terminus, Miyajima-guchi. This was another transport surprise, because
after a dozen stops in street-tramway mode, à
la Leeds or Sheffield circa 1950,
the streetcar turns a corner into a complicated little station and then becomes
a fully-fledged railway, like the Fleetwood tramroad but far longer, with
houses backing on to the track, stations at regular intervals and endless
automatic full-barrier crossings. A
road-sign outside Miyajima-guchi station shows the distance back to Hiroshima
as 23km, but the rail line is actually 16.1km.
The ferry takes about fifteen minutes to cross a stretch of
water to a wonderfully picturesque island, Miyajima,
with the steep, deeply forested mountains that you see in Japanese prints, and
on the foreshore the Itsukushima Shrine,
ostensibly dating back to the twelfth century but apparently last replaced in
1875. Tourists flock to photograph
themselves with their backs to this monument;
schoolchildren are brought in droves to line up for class
photographs. There are sacred deer, in
Shinto belief the messengers of the gods, which are regularly fed by the
tourists, despite notices forbidding it.
The Hiroden public-transport operator, through its
subsidiary Hiroshima Tourism Promoting [Hiroshima
Kankō Kaihatsu] runs a ropeway up the sacred Mount Misen. The upper
terminus is a thirty-minute hike to the actual summit at 1,755 feet but you
can’t have everything: the ropeway takes
out 945 feet of that climb and every little helps.
The island has much else to offer, several temples and a
pagoda, and spectacular displays of blossom in spring and maple leaves in
autumn. I could cheerfully return for a
Japanese holiday on Miyajima, knowing that a day-visit to Hiroshima city is
easily practical.
Cemetery of St Michael, Rivelin Valley, Sheffield: chapel interior
On the north-western outskirts of Sheffield, a short walk up the Rivelin Valley from the Supertram terminus at Malin Bridge, a gateway leads to the Roman Catholic cemetery of St Michael, opened in 1862 and still in use: https://www.saintmichaelscemetery.org.
After the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the first
parish church in the area was St Bede’s,
opened at Masborough on the then outskirts of Rotherham in 1842. It was followed by the parish church of St Marie in Sheffield (1850), now the
cathedral of the Diocese of Hallam, and another large church, St Vincent’s (1853 onwards) was started
in The Crofts, an overcrowded area north of the town centre where Irish
Catholics settled after the Potato Famine.
Of these, only St Bede’s had a burial ground, until in 1862 the priest at St Vincent’s, Father Burke, purchased eight acres of steeply sloping land in the Rivelin Valley from the snuff-manufacturer Mr Wilson, whose family had also provided the land for the General Cemetery nearly thirty years before.
The cemetery, with a temporary chapel, was dedicated on Michaelmas Day, September 29th 1863.
The present chapel was built in 1877, financed by a gift of £2,000 from the Sheffield tailor and gents’ outfitter, George Harvey Foster, and designed by the father-and-son practice Matthew Ellison and Charles Hadfield. This new chapel is 72 feet long and 22 feet wide, built in the Early English style. It has an apsidal east end, a sixty-foot-high bellcote above the west door, and the south-west porch is embellished with a statue of St Michael slaying Satan as a dragon.
The interior, restored in 2005, is distinguished by the work
of an impressive group of contemporary artists.
The marble and alabaster altar, with its figure of the dead Christ, is
from the Cheltenham workshop of the sculptor Richard Lockwood Boulton.
Further decorations were funded by a gift of £430 by the Foster family in 1884 – wall paintings by Charles Hadfield and Nathaniel Westlake, who also designed the west window, and the three east windows designed by John Francis Bentley, who later became the architect of Westminster Cathedral, and manufactured by Nathaniel Westlake’s stained-glass company, Lavers & Westlake.
The two most prominent monuments in the cemetery stand above
the family vaults of George Harvey Foster (1829-1894), and the department-store
proprietor, John Walsh (d1905), respectively gothic and neo-Classical and
constructed within a decade of each other.
The sharp gradient makes exploring the cemetery a strenuous
activity, and visitors are advised not to stray from paths because gravestones
may be unstable.
Higher up the valley side are two more burial grounds, a
very small Jewish cemetery and the Church of England Walkley Cemetery, both
opened in 1860.
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