Wardsend Cemetery

Wardsend Cemetery

The cemetery is currently in an overgrown state
Details
Established	1859
Location	Owlerton, Sheffield, South Yorkshire
Country	United Kingdom
Type	Anglican cemetery
Style	Victorian
Owned by	Sheffield City Council
Size	5.5 acres
No. of graves	20,000+
Website	Friends of Wardsend Cemetery

Wardsend Cemetery is an abandoned Victorian cemetery in the Owlerton district of Sheffield, England, consecrated by the Archbishop of York in 1859 and closed to legal burial in 1968.

The ground on which the cemetery stands was originally purchased by John Livesey in 1857, the Vicar of the nearby St. Philip's Church as an overspill burial ground.

The first burial at Wardsend was of a 2-year-old girl named Ann Marie Marsden in 1857. She is, in keeping with tradition, the "Guardian of the Cemetery".

The graveyard is also noteworthy for being the final resting place of George Lambert, a highly decorated Irish soldier, for holding graves of many victims of the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864, and being the only cemetery in Britain with an active railway line passing through it.

Sheffield Archives offers much material on the history of the cemetery, perhaps most significantly a detailed narrative account of the 1862 riot and subsequent court hearings entitled Extraordinary Doings in a Cemetery in Sheffield by Ivor Haythorne, and a 2013 dissertation project (heavily influenced by the history from below movement spearheaded by E.P. Thompson and George Rudé) called Crisis of Confidence: The Public Response to the 1862 Sheffield Resurrection Scandal by Jordan Lee Smith.

On the evening of 3 June 1862 the cemetery was the location of a turbulent riot by angry Sheffield citizens, against accusations that the Reverend John Livesey and his sexton Isaac Howard were neglecting to bury corpses, and instead selling them to the town's medical school for use in anatomical dissection. The rumours were proven false and Livesey and Howard were instead fined by York Assizes for reusing graves in order to save space. However both were later paid compensation for the damage caused to their property during the riot, and Livesey was reinstated as the Vicar of St. Philip's Church.