Histon Road Cemetery, Cambridge, England

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest.  

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

Following a meeting of the Cambridge Town Council in 1841, it was decided to create a public cemetery for the middle classes as soon as possible and in October 1842 the Cambridge General Cemetery Company was created. The Histon Road Cemetery was established in 1843 on 3 acres (c 1.25ha) of ground which had been acquired by the CGCC, operated by Robert Peters of Downing Street, Cambridge (Slater 1993), from Mr George Foster. It was to remain unconsecrated for use chiefly by Nonconformists. The CGCC commissioned John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843) to design the layout and he first came to inspect the land in November 1842. Writing about design in the Gardener's Magazine in 1843, Loudon noted that he found it to be flat, open, and airy with a gentle inclination to one end, enclosed on three sides by recently planted thorn hedges and on the north side by open fields. The article was entitled 'Landscape Gardening applied to Public Cemeteries' and in it he used Histon Road as an example to expound his views on cemetery design in general. (He designed only two others before his death in 1843; at Southampton, which was not carried out, and at Bath Abbey (qv).) The Histon Road design featured again in On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries, Loudon's seminal work on the subject which was published in the same year as the article. For Histon Road, Loudon produced designs for both the layout and the buildings, and he worked on the details of the lodge and chapel with his friend, the architect Edward Buckton Lamb. Ambitious plans for an elaborate Italian-style chapel by Loudon were rejected in favour of Lamb's gothic building. In 1844 and 1845 several diarists recorded their visits to the cemetery in appreciative tones. In 1935 the cemetery passed into the ownership of the Borough of Cambridge Commons and Cemetery Committee (BCCCC) who carried out repairs to the buildings and the grounds (Cambs Local Hist Soc 2000) but by 1957 the repairs necessary to the chapel had become so great that it was demolished. The site remains (2001) in the ownership of Cambridge Borough Council.