Birmingham Crematorium

Birmingham Crematorium
The main building in December 2013
Alternative names	Perry Barr Crematorium
General information
Type	Crematorium
Address	Walsall Road, Perry Barr
Town or city	Birmingham
Country	England
Coordinates	52°31′47″N 1°54′32″W / 52.52975°N 1.90880°W / 52.52975; -1.90880Coordinates: 52°31′47″N 1°54′32″W / 52.52975°N 1.90880°W / 52.52975; -1.90880
Opened	1903 (1903)
Cost	£7,000
Owner	Dignity plc
Design and construction
Architect	Frank Osborne

Birmingham Crematorium is a Protestant crematorium in the Perry Barr district of Birmingham, England, designed by Frank Osborne and opened in 1903. A columbarium was added in 1928. The crematorium is now owned and operated by Dignity plc.

Cremation was not declared legal in Great Britain until 1885, by precedent from the trial of William Price. Despite the opening of Woking Crematorium in 1878 and the passing of the Cremation Act 1902, which came into effect on 1 April 1903, it remained controversial, on religious grounds, in the first decade of the twentieth century. However, proposals to build a crematorium for the city of Birmingham, the ninth such facility in the United Kingdom, received support from Sir Oliver Lodge, Principal of the University of Birmingham, and were given the approval of the three local bishops: Edmund Knox (Coventry), Augustus Legge (Lichfield) and Charles Gore (Worcester) (Birmingham did not have its own bishop until 1905).

In a letter read at the opening ceremony, Bishop Gore wrote:

What I should desire when I myself die is that my body should be reduced rapidly to ashes, so that it may do no harm to the living, and then in accordance with Christian feeling be laid in the earth.

Similarly, Bishop Knox wrote that:

In spite of strong sentimental objections very naturally entertained, we shall come to see that under the conditions of modern life cremation is not only preferable from the sanitary point of view, but that it is also the most reverent and decent treatment of the bodies of the dead.