Sale And Brooklands Cemetery Chapel

SJ79SE 458/3/10038 12-DEC-00

MARSLAND ROAD Sale and Brooklands Cemetery Chapel

II

Cemetery Chapels. .c 1865. By Robert McBeath of Sale, architect, and Luke Winstanley, of Sale, Builder for the Sale Burial Board. Coursed thin sandstone rubble with ashlar dressings, coped gables with cross finials and a Welsh slate roof covering, laid in decorative bands . PLAN : H-plan complex with tower and spire rising from central archway , and tall gabled flanking crosswings with linking lower ranges extending to from outer entrance porches. EXTERIOR: FRONT: Symmetrical composition with 2-stage square tower with stepped buttresses rising from central pointed - arched opening at the axis of the approaches to the chapel complex. The tower supports a slender octagonal spire with lucarnes and a finial. Single storeyed ranges extend from either side to link with taller 3-bay chapel crosswings with steep coped gables, each with low angle buttresses and wide gable with pointed-arched 4-light windows, now overboarded, with traceried heads below hood moulds with carved head stops Above, full-width pitched moulding, as if to weather lower attached range, with blind trefoil within apex. . Pointed lancets to side walls. Lower gabled porches to outer walls of chapels, the entrances beneath pointed-arched openings, and with inner doorways with double vertically-boarded doors with elaborate strap hinges. REAR : Lower rear single bay projections each with oculus, now overboarded. INTERIOR: Not inspected. HISTORY: The closure of overcrowded and unsanitary urban church cemeteries which posed serious public health problems in the mid-C19 led to the establishment of numerous burial boards charged with the provision and management of new cemeteries throughout England. The Sale Cemetery is an early manifestation of this movement. A little -altered mid-C19 cemetery chapel complex, in a Decorated Gothic Revival style, which forms the central feature of a planned burial ground landscape . This example is thought to be one of the earliest such developments which followed from the establishment of Burial Boards in urban areas where ecclesiastical churchyards were considered no longer suitable for interments.

Listing NGR: SJ7839891379