Monument record 3884/8 - London Road Cemetery

{1} Cemetery, London Road. Burial board was formed in 1857. A cemetery with two mortuary chapels was opened in 1858, one for the Church of England and one for Non-conformists. Both chapels are still in existence and form an identical mirror image of each other, they are now boarded up and would appear to be out of use.(Film 15 photo 9-10). The cemetery has an associated lodge on the London Road frontage which would now appear to be in domestic usage. (Film 15 photo 11) A further cemetery was added in 1906.

{3} During the 17th and 18th centuries the practise of burial in Church of England churchyards was increasingly being criticised. This was due, in part to the perceived unsanitary conditions that were created by the burial of yet more people in already overcrowded churchyards. It was also due in part to the fact that the Churchyards were exclusively Anglican, in a time when more and more people saw themselves as Dissenters, or Non-Conformists. By the early 19th century, in response to this demand, a number of public cemeteries were being opened by private companies interested in making a profit from burying the dead.
The Interment Act of 1853 allowed for the provision of publicly-funded cemeteries across the country, ushering in a boom of construction by publicly-financed Burial Boards run by parish vestries (the ancestors of today’s local authorities).
The London Road Cemetery was founded in 1857 on what was then the outskirts of Wellingborough, on a three acre plot of land known as Castle Close (Northamptonshire Record Office Map 1718). The main buildings of the cemetery, the Non-conformist mortuary chapel, Church of England mortuary chapel and cemetery lodge and gates were all designed by EF Law, in a ‘Spiky Gothic’ style, as part of the planned layout of the cemetery (Pevsner 1972). The chapels are interesting because they are exact mirror images of each other.
As an architect, EF Law was well-renowned in Northamptonshire and beyond, primarily because he carried out a large proportion of church restorations undertaken in the county, including those at Potterspury, Roade and Little Billing among others. He was also the County Surveyor for a number of years.
The design of the cemetery is based on a fairly formal grid structure, a utilitarian style that was finding favour at this time. An early photograph of the cemetery shows that is was fairly sparse and exposed (Plate 5). All the trees that nowadays shade the cemetery are newly planted, and the view to the east appears to look over open fields, since at this point no housing had been built between Castle Fields and the cemetery. Another three acres were added to the north of the existing cemetery at a later date. A newspaper article from the ‘Wellingborough News’ in 1950 shows that vandals are not a purely modern phenomenon, because it reports that several of the heavy tombstones in the cemetery had been uprooted by vandals.
The most famous resident of the cemetery is the poet John Askham who was born in 1825 and who died in 1894. He was born into quite a poor family and as a child had to work in his father’s shoe-making shop. It was because of this that he received very little education and, later in life, had to teach himself to read and write. Despite this, in 1871, Northampton elected Askham to the city’s first school board. He also went on to hold small offices in local government. During his life, he was also a schoolmaster and a journalist.
The cemetery is now closed to burials; all current burials take place at the Doddington Road cemetery.

<1> Ballinger J., 1999, Northamptonshire Extensive Urban Survey: Wellingborough (Industrial), (unchecked) (Digital archive). SNN100290.

<2> , 1950, Ordnance Survey 2.5 Inch Series, SP86 (unchecked) (Map). SNN59846.

<3> Walker C., 2006, Documentary Research for Wellingborough Green Heritage Trail, 2.4 London Road Cemetery (checked) (Report). SNN108005.

Record last edited

Nov 2 2016 12:34PM