Billing Road Cemetery
The next chapter ...
Northamptonshire Gardens Trust is delighted to announce that it has won The Gardens Trust’s Community Grant Award.
This award is a new venture for the national Gardens Trust and Northamptonshire Gardens Trust became the first recipient along with Leicesterhshire Gardens Trust. Our project was selected from hundreds of applications across the country.
How the grant will be used
The Gardens Trust Community Award is a grant for up to £2,500 and is intended to help seed-fund volunteer projects that will support historic designed landscapes in the UK. Our funding award will be used to establish an active and enthusiastic Friends of Billing Road Cemetery Group.
Why not volunteer to help establish this Friends Group?
Interested?
Contact Elaine Johnson, Chair of Northamptonshire Gardens Trust, at northantsgardenstrust@gmail.com
The aims of our project
Our project will:
Identify and promote the site as an important historic landscape.
Aid conservation of the historic garden cemetery.
Enable learning about the historic and social value of the cemetery, its place in the community and the lives of those buried in the cemetery, both from Northampton and further afield.
Bring people together both within and across communities.
Support a culture of sympathetic physical care of the green space, for both its heritage and ecological value.
Provide a cherished green open space for the enjoyment, health and wellbeing of the community.
Involve a wider range of people in Northamptonshire’s heritage.
A brief history of the cemetery
The now disused Billing Road Cemetery is one of the most significant heritage assets within the Billing Road Conservation Area. Formerly known as Northampton General Cemetery it opened in 1847 and was laid out to a design by Scottish born Robert Marnock (1880-1889), one of the most eminent horticulturalists and garden designers working in England during the mid-nineteenth century.
The cemetery contains a single Grade II Listed monument, a remarkable sculpture of a horse on a plinth, dedicated to the famous circus owner Robert Fossett (1859─1915) and his family. Another notable monument, is that to Caroline Chisholm (1808-1877) and her husband Archibald. Caroline famously worked to improve education and living conditions for women first in India and then for many thousands of emigrants in Australia (where her work is recognised as so culturally significant that she was chosen to be portrayed on Australian bank notes and postage stamps).
In Northampton demand at Billing Road was so high for burial spaces that the original cemetery had to be expanded and a northern extension to the cemetery was created before the end of the nineteenth century. At its maximum extent the cemetery comprised 13 acres and contained over 21,000 burials. A twentieth century war memorial commemorates 149 war dead from both World Wars.
The cemetery is currently an important public green space much used by dog walkers.
