Greenwood’s Picture of Hull, 1835 (s.p.b.s) in his section on Sculcoates Georgian church (s.p.b.s) states that ‘near the church is a new burial ground, formed about eight years ago’ (c.1827). He describes this detached burial ground as being three acres in size surrounded by a brick wall and created at a cost of £4000 ‘which was raised by a rate levied on the parishioners’. Clearly by this time the churchyard proper (which survives on the corner of Air St. and Bankside s.p.b.s) had become ‘full’, much of the reason for this being that Hull had burst the confines of its medieval town walls with the building of the New Dock (later Queen’s Dock) and the late Georgian streets such as Albion St. and Percy St. built beyond, this urban sprawl in the parish of Sculcoates. What-is-more these Georgian terraces were built to cater for a relatively wealthy, often mercantile, clientele whose distinction in life demanded commensurate monuments after death.
Greenwood then goes on to state that this new detached burial ground had built in it a ‘small but elegant structure wherein the burial service is performed’ (see Greenwood’s sketch above). Greenwood states that this chapel was built in the ‘pointed style of architecture’ (Early English, originally of the 13th century and much-loved by the devotees of the Gothic Revival movement) and having ‘porches with crocketed pinnacles’ on both sides. Apparently on the interior ceiling was painted a scene ‘representing a group of seraphic and cherubic figures’ (very classical). This building represents a forerunner of the later chapels of rest in municipal cemeteries although they normally had two chapels one for Established church parishioners, one for Nonconformist. Clearly the Sculcoates parish authorities were not then so even-handed.
This detached (and long-since disused) cemetery survives on Sculcoates Lane, sadly the building does not.
(to be continued)
Personal Point of View 1 = Now well into the fourth week of national and international ‘lock-down’ in the face of the global pandemic caused by the spread of Covid-19 virus and with ‘updates’ monopolised by national deaths figures and the logistics of government responses where is the debate about cause? Where did it start and why? If we don’t know the answers to that then the next question is when will the next one come along? Prevention is better than cure.
One country is stating that China was deliberately slow in informing the world about the epidemic and that the World Health Organisation is in their pocket (albeit by a terrible President), but that is almost inevitable given the global power of China, the question remains what in China started it and where. We sort of know the answer to the second of these two questions but what in Wuhan started the epidemic, and what is the global community going to do about it?
(to be continued)