March 2019

Following the adoptive Burial Acts of the 1850s, with later amending legislation, Hull Corporation established two large municipal cemeteries by the end of the century – Western Cemetery, Spring Bank West from 1861 and Hedon Road Cemetery from 1875. Western Cemetery was in effect a continuation westward of the Hull General Cemetery site (see previous […]

By the late 18th century both of Hull’s then parish churches had had to have plots of land outside the then built-up areas consecrated for burials as the problems related to burials in their adjacent churchyards had become all but intolerable. The detached burial ground for Holy Trinity church was beside Castle Street (see recent blogs),

The picture above shows the surviving pedestrian access to the Castle Street disused burial site (s.p.b.s) looking across from the side of Railway Dock, this now moorings for pleasure craft. By the late 19th century the area of grass shown in the picture was a timber storage area on the dock-side, there are a couple of

To return, for a moment, to the Castle Street disused burial ground, Hull (closed for burials 1861, s.p.b.s), and to further the theme of the partnership between cemeteries and parks, it was minuted (Corporation, Miscellaneous Committees – Burial) in October 1887 that gardeners were to be appointed to ‘disused burial grounds in the borough’ and,

The picture above is taken from Neave, D. Lost Churches and Chapels of Hull (1991, 51) and shows a drawing by F.S. Smith of the Georgian church of St. Mary’s Church, Sculcoates built around 1759. The churchyard shown could well have been a quiet ‘place of resort’. The church building was demolished early in the

An additional point re the last blog’s consideration of the common features of public parks and municipal cemeteries is that in 1904 Kingston upon Hull Urban Sanitary Authority combined the two previously separate committees for Burials and Parks, henceforth known as the Parks and Burials Committee. The picture above shows the south-west corner of Castle St. disused