Treasures from Southern Cemetery ……………..

Now there is a lot to say about Southern Cemetery and over the years I have done my fair share.*

Memorial to Satinik Kouyoumjian, 2013

It was opened in 1879, is still a municipally run cemetery which is the largest in Britain and the second largest in Europe.

Battered but still doing the biz, 2026

And like all those other Victorian public cemeteries, it is more than just a burial place.  

It is a place rich in history from the monuments of the great and good to the humbler gravestones, each with a story of which the inscriptions are clues to much more about the lives of those interred here.

Added to the reminders of those past lives there is an abundance of nature, from mature and not so mature trees to the abundance of wildlife.

For the Corporation who bought the 100-acre site in 1872 the grand plan was thwarted by drainage issues which put a hold on proceedings and involved the construction of a sewer to the river Mersey which was two miles away. **

It was indeed a very necessary project give than “water stood throughout the ground at about three below the surface and permeated the substratum of sand down to the clay about 15 feet deep”. *** 

Nor was this all because the in constructing the chapels workmen had to dig down to the clay levels and then build concrete piers and brick arches for the foundations to rest on.

Waiting for a paint job, 2026

All of which makes me ponder on the sagacity of the landowners who sold off the 100 acres, especially as a cursory glance of maps from the 1840s and 1850s show a fair a fair number of ponds and culverted water courses.

It's all in the detail, 2026

Outside the Jewish Cemetery, Southern Cemetery 2026

But enough of such doom and disappointment.

The civil engineering scheme was completed, the chapels built and the citizens of Manchester signed up for their little bit of eternal rest.

And now one hundred and forty-seven years later there is much to see, and on Monday after attending a funeral I took a walk and recorded some fine examples the railings that abut the wall of the cemetery running along Barlow Moor Road from the Crematorium all the way to Princess Parkway.

Like many I rarely even noticed them, but they are well worth looking at and remarkably despite layers of peeling paint they are in good condition.

Which is all I want to say.

Location; Southern Cemetery

Pictures; Memorial to Satinik Kouyoumjian, 2013, and those bits of iron, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Southern Cemetery, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Southern%20Cemetery & The Quirks of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson, and Peter Topping, 2017

**The New Manchester Cemetery, The Manchester Guardian, May 23rd 1879

***ibid, The New Manchester Cemetery