Sheffield General Cemetery
Coordinates: 53°22′9″N 1°29′14″W / 53.36917°N 1.48722°W
The General Cemetery in the City of Sheffield, England opened in 1836 and closed for burial in 1978. It was the principal cemetery in Victorian Sheffield with over 87,000 burials. Today it is a listed Landscape (Grade II*) on the English Heritage National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. It is also a Local Nature Reserve. It is owned by the City of Sheffield and managed on behalf the city by a local community group, the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust.
The General Cemetery (grid reference SK342859) is located just over a mile to the south-west of Sheffield city centre, in the district of Sharrow. It occupies a north-facing hillside site between Sharrow Vale and Sharrow Head. The Porter Brook runs along its north-west edge, and Cemetery Road forms the boundary to the south-east. The Gatehouse entrance is accessed from Cemetery Avenue off Eccelsall Road.
The General Cemetery was one of the first commercial landscape cemeteries in Britain. Its opening in 1836 as a Nonconformist cemetery was a response to the rapid growth of Sheffield and the relatively poor state of the town's churchyards. The cemetery, with its Greek Doric and Egyptian style buildings, was designed by Sheffield architect Samuel Worth (1779–1870) on the site of a former quarry.Robert Marnock who also designed Sheffield Botanical Gardens (1836) and Weston Park (1873) acted as a landscape consultant for this initial phase. The first burial was of Mary Ann Fish, a victim of tuberculosis. An Anglican cemetery with a chapel designed by William Flockton and a landscape laid out by Robert Marnock was consecrated alongside the Nonconformist cemetery in 1846—the wall that divided the unconsecrated and consecrated ground can still be seen today. By 1916 the cemetery was rapidly filling up and running out of space, burials in family plots continued through the 1950s and 1960s, but by 1978 ownership of the cemetery had passed to Sheffield City Council and it was closed to all new burials. In 1980 the council got permission by Act of Parliament to clear 800 gravestones to make a recreation area. Through the 1980s and 1990s most of the rest of the cemetery was left untouched, becoming overgrown and an important sanctuary for local wildlife. Unfortunately, many of the buildings also fell into disrepair. In early 2003 work began to restore the gatehouse and catacombs funded by a £500,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The restored gatehouse now houses the offices of the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust.
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