Park tucked away in Liverpool city centre where 60,000 bodies are buried
It’s not often you can be in the same place as lord mayors, businessmen and social reformers who helped shape the city's history. But many of them are buried in St James’ Cemetery, tucked away in Liverpool city centre.
In 1825, an old quarry lying between Hope Street, Upper Duke Street and Parliament Street was transformed into a huge graveyard, acting as an alternative to the two-hectare Liverpool Necropolis - also known as Low Hill Cemetery - on Everton Road, which was becoming full.
Over the next 100 years or so, the number of bodies buried there rose to 57,839, with the last known burials there taking place in 1936. Today, it offers a peaceful green space in the city centre far away from the busy roads above.
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I’d never been to St James’ Cemetery before, despite living in Merseyside for the majority of my life. I decided to change that this week and visited the cemetery on a weekday afternoon.
I was joined on my journey by Edward Kelly, who offers guided walking tours of the city through a company called LiverpoolGo. Edward enjoys showing people around the cemetery because of what tells us about Liverpool’s history and the mysteries that remain around it.
While people in the upper echelons of Liverpool’s society were marked by huge gravestones with detailed, stone-carved tributes, many of the city’s poor were buried in unmarked graves, with coffins stacked on top of each other, meaning there are many people buried in there that we don’t know the name of.
Edward said: “I saw some students here one summer. One of them was saying, ‘be careful, don't stand on the graves’, and I thought, wherever you stand is a grave. They didn't realise how full it was.”
You enter the cemetery via a gate by The Oratory, the old chapel of St James' Cemetery close to the Anglican Cathedral. You walk down a steep path where you can immediately see gravestones marked on either side of the wall.
It’s hard not to feel a little unnerved as you walk past these and under a small tunnel. Once you get to the end however, you’re greeted with a large sunken park full of people from all strands of society, from families and students to litter pickers and tourists.
One of the first graves we looked at was of a huge tombstone for George Drinkwater, with his father George Snr buried behind him. George Jnr was Lord Mayor of the city from 1829 to 1830, while his dad was a slave owner.
Another large grave was for William Brown. The street where Central Library sits is named after him. Edward said: “Eventually he became very wealthy, and it was said that a sixth of the trade that came into Liverpool went through his hands. Clearly these days, his name's frowned upon because he was involved in profiteering off slave labour.”
Edward also showed me the grave of Kitty Wilkinson. Kitty came from Ireland to Liverpool in the 1800s. During the cholera epidemic of the 1830s, she opened up her house for neighbours to wash their clothes, saving many lives in the process.
Edward said: “Today a public wash house seems very strange, given nearly everybody has a washing machine. In those days it was unheard of. People very often wouldn't wash and would wear the clothes until they fell off them.”
She also opened the first public wash house in the country on Upper Frederick Street in 1842. A fresh set of pink flowers were by her graveside, showing the love for her achievements over 100 years on.
There is also the Huskisson memorial, a circular building which contains the remains of businessman and politician William Huskisson. He is commonly known as the world's first widely reported railway passenger casualty as he was run over and fatally injured by Robert Stephenson's pioneering locomotive Rocket on the Manchester-Liverpool Railway.
There is also a series of graves containing the names of deceased orphans who were housed in orphanages and hospitals in the city. The cemetery's sunken position makes it a great place to escape the noise of the city centre.
However, it is also a sombre place filled with visual markers of some of the darkest parts of Liverpool’s history. It’s beautiful, haunting and fascinating in equal measure. With so much history to be explored, I’ll definitely be visiting again.
Edward said a lot of people in the city don’t realise it's even there. He said: “Use this as a starting point to look at some of the history of Liverpool, some of the people who were involved in the developments of Liverpool, for good or for bad.
“The first person that was buried here was a man called John Heron and he lived in Slater Street. When he was buried, apparently it was the worst thunder and lightning storm ever known on the day of his funeral. The deeper you dig, the more you find.”