North Chapel of Sunderland Cemetery is a Grade II listed building in the Sunderland local planning authority area, England. First listed on 17 October 1994. A Victorian Chapel.
North Chapel of Sunderland Cemetery
- WRENN ID
- proud-spandrel-raven
- Grade
- II
- Local Planning Authority
- Sunderland
- Constituency
- Sunderland Central MP: Lewis Atkinson (Lab)
- Country
- England
- Date first listed
- 17 October 1994
- Type
- Chapel
- Period
- Victorian
- Address
- North Chapel of Sunderland Cemetery, Ryhope Road
- OS grid reference
- NZ 406 544
- Coordinates
- 54.88341, -1.36714
- Source
- Historic England listing
Description
The North Chapel of Sunderland Cemetery is a chapel located in Sunderland, built around 1858. It is constructed from snecked limestone rubble, featuring an ashlar plinth and dressings, and has a Welsh slate roof with stone gable copings and a wrought-iron finial. The chapel is oriented with the geographical north as its ritual east. It includes a nave with a sanctuary and transepts, a north vestry, a west porch, and a northwest tower.
Designed in the Decorated style, it showcases tracery and buttresses. The half-octagonal sanctuary has cusped lights beneath lion-masked eaves gutters leading to a pointed roof. The transepts feature three-light windows set on a sill string with ball-leaf stops. The west porch is flanked by diagonal stepped buttresses and has a double door within a pointed-arched moulded surround, set under a gable topped with a fleur-de-lys finial. A trefoil is positioned at the peak of the nave gable.
The square tower, which is slightly set back from the porch, has tall lancets with alternate block jambs and flower-stopped hoodmoulds above geometric tracery. The tower features gabled diagonal buttresses that step back to the gables, adorned with incised trefoils. It transitions to an octagonal plan and rises through a series of receding stepped copings to a high octagonal belfry stage, which includes high pointed-arched louvred openings beneath a head-stopped dripstring, topped with a tall stone spire. The roof is finished with fleur-de-lys finials on the overlapping stone gable coping, and there is a wrought-iron cross finial at the east end.
Local climate
North Chapel of Sunderland Cemetery sits in a drier-than-average part of the UK, with an average of 720 mm of rain a year. This makes it drier than 83% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is lower than that of 95% of listed buildings.
It experiences an average of 27 freeze-thaw cycles a year, fewer than 71% of listed buildings. Of these, 15 follow at least 1 mm of rain in the preceding 48 hours. Average temperatures at this location have risen by 0.3°C per decade since 1991.
Averages for 1991–2020; temperature trend 1991–2025. Figures describe the wider area (a grid cell of roughly 10 km), not the individual site. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026.
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