A Walking Tour of City Road Cemetery

Meet at the main entrance to City Road Cemetery (postcode S2 1GD) near Spring Lane tram stop. You can take the 120 bus from the city to Halfway or to Crystal Peaks.The walk will take about 2 hours. It starts with a short climb from the gatehouse to the crematorium and is then mainly flat.

The City Road Cemetery was laid out on land purchased in 1878, by the Sheffield Burials Board from the Duke of Norfolk, the country’s premier Catholic peer and a major landowner (as the Norfolk family remains) in Sheffield. M E Hadfield and Sons designed the structures in the Cemetery – Church of England and Nonconformist chapels, gateways, lodges and housing for officials, and later the crematorium – all in late Perpendicular style and using local stone.

We will view St Michael’s Roman Catholic Cemetery chapel which Valerie Bayliss has nominated for The Victorian Society’s Top Ten Endangered Buildings list. Notwithstanding its denomination, it has never belonged to the RC church, being in the ownership and care of Sheffield City Council. Unfortunately the chapel is not safe to enter.

Amongst all the memorials in this cemetery, we will see the Belgian War Memorial and the Sheffield Blitz Memorial garden.

If people want to look at another example of Charles Hadfield’s work, we can go past Manor Lodge school on the way back to City Road.

Roman Catholic Mortuary Chapel, City Road Cemetery (on the right is the Belgian War Memorial)

Host or Publisher SY Victorian Society