Billing Road Cemetery

The design

The cemetery on Billing Road is an example of a style known as a garden cemetery. In the nineteenth century new cemeteries were desperately needed for towns and cities throughout Europe due to the overcrowded and insanitary conditions within early urban churchyards and other sectarian cemeteries. In 1804 the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery opened near Paris. Its design and planting may have been inspired by the eighteenth-century English landscape garden movement, and in turn Père Lachaise was much admired by nineteenth-century British designers, most notably John Claudius Loudon who wrote On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries (London, 1843); this became the nineteenth century manual for cemetery design and management.

Garden cemeteries were typically nondenominational and were laid out beyond urban commercial and residential areas, but still close enough for the population to visit. They typically contained at least one chapel, gate lodges and other structures such as ornate monuments, memorials and mausoleums set within attractive landscapes reminiscent of designed parks or gardens. This was at least partly because they were also intended to be used as municipal green spaces, provided for the physical and spiritual wellbeing of the visiting public. Many garden cemeteries became precursors for the philanthropic provision of public parks for the recreation of urban populations.

Scottish born, Robert Marnock (1800─1889), became one of the eminent horticulturalists and garden designers working in England during the mid-nineteenth century. In 1829 he became Head Gardener at Bretton Hall in Yorkshire (now home of The Yorkshire Sculpture Park), at which time he may have seen and been impressed by a wooden model of Père Lachaise Cemetery, which was exhibited in Sheffield in 1828. Marnock subsequently moved to Sheffield and designed its Botanical Gardens which were opened in 1836, the same year as the opening of the Sheffield General Cemetery, where he also greatly assisted in the design. His talent was being recognised nationally and in 1839 he moved on to design the gardens of the newly-formed Royal Botanic Society in Regent’s Park, London, and he became Superintendent there until 1863. 

It was during his tenure in London that Marnock was commissioned by the Northampton General Cemetery Company (established in 1845) to design a garden cemetery of nine acres for the town as a solution to Northampton’s overcrowded and unhealthy medieval churchyards. Marnock’s intention for the Northampton cemetery appears to have not included masses of individual, personalised headstones, as this was not the sort of cluttered landscape he sought to create; there would however be extensive planting of shrubs and evergreen trees. Unfortunately the archive of his plans and architectural drawings for Northampton appears to have been recently lost. Robert Marnock subsequently went on to design cemeteries at Ely, Cambridgeshire (1853) and Stroud, Gloucestershire (1854). His works will be celebrated nationally during 2023.