Billing Road Cemetery
It's history, design and demise
One of the most significant heritage assets within the Billing Road Conservation Area
In Northampton, demand for burial spaces at Billing Road was so high 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. Burial rights ceased around 2010 and the site is currently owned and managed by West Northamptonshire Council.
Robert Fossett monument
The cemetery contains a single Listed (Grade II) monument, a remarkable sculpture of a horse on a plinth, dedicated to the famous circus owner Robert Fossett (1859─1915) and his family.
An almost identical horse monument can be found in St John's Cemetery, Margate, dedicated to the Sanger family of circus owners.
Caroline Chisholm monument
Another notable monument, 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. (Her work was recognised as culturally significant and so she was chosen to be portrayed on Australian bank notes and postage stamps).
War Memorial
There is also a twentieth-century war memorial that commemorates 149 war dead from both World Wars.
This is tended by The Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
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.
When it opened
The cemetery in Billing Road was duly opened 18th July 1847 at a cost of around £5,000 and was the town’s first secular burial site. It was financed by shareholders who were offered a beautiful, tranquil final resting place within a family plot as well as an investment opportunity. (The first recorded burial in the cemetery was 18-year-old Selena Mawby, from nearby Bouverie Street.) The original layout is shown on Wood and Law’s 1847 Map of Northampton, and nearly a century later the 1937 Ordnance Survey map shows continued good survival of the original layout of the cemetery with its lodges and mortuary chapel (with vaults beneath), as well as the northern extension of the burial area which was added in the 1880s. It is clear from contemporary photographs however, that whilst Marnock’s initial concept was that of a semi-naturalistic garden, the demand for burial plots with their inevitable memorials grew and grew until the landscape became densely cluttered with monuments.
Its demise
From the Second World War the cemetery’s fortunes turned. Significantly, the Counties Crematorium at Milton Malsor opened in 1939 as cremation became a popular funerary option. And in 1941 an enemy bomb was dropped on the Billing Road cemetery, creating a deep crater and causing considerable damage. In 1959 the Northampton General Cemetery Company was wound up and care of the cemetery passed to Northampton Borough Council. Since then the layout at Billing Road has gradually lost its original elaborate configuration. The mortuary chapel on the east side of the site has been demolished as have the lodges at both original entrances to the southwest and the northwest. Most of the cemetery’s monuments have also been lost or taken. Many of the remaining monuments are in a perilous state because of vandalism, self-set trees and general neglect. Ironically the effect of this has probably been to inadvertently create the naturalistic effect originally desired by Robert Marnock!
The 2012 Billing Road Conservation Area Appraisal and Management plan stated that there are relatively few areas of negative townscape value within the Conservation Area, but the most significant of them is the Billing Road Cemetery. It describes the cemetery as a tranquil space despite its proximity to a busy road. The thick hedgerow, which separates the cemetery from Billing Road, and its many trees, a few of which are probably original to its design, attract birds and provides a welcome open space in what is now a densely built-up part of the town. However the cemetery is also described as a space with an atmosphere of sad neglect. There have been no significant positive developments in the area since 2012 during which time the cemetery and its monuments have deteriorated further. The cemetery is extremely popular with dog walkers and has much to offer as green space for the whole community; it is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
