Eastern Gate Piers To Southampton Cemetery

Eastern Gate Piers to Southampton Cemetery

These gate piers, dating to around 1880, form the eastern entrance to Southampton Old Cemetery and are built in the Gothic Revival style. They are constructed of squared ashlar stone, set on a stone base featuring snecked panels of roughly dressed stone with a blind trefoil decoration at the mid-point of the front elevation. Each pier is topped with a trefoil gablet, which mirrors the blind trefoil motif on the main body of the pier. The inner face of each pier has a rough stone pilaster where the gate hinges, while the outer face features a short pier with gablet cap where the pier meets the cemetery wall.

The current gates are twentieth-century replacements made of wrought iron vertical bars with cross hatch iron bar decoration at their mid-point and are not of special interest.

Southampton Old Cemetery is one of the earliest municipal cemeteries in England. The land was acquired from Southampton Common in 1843 by Act of Parliament, granting the Corporation control of 15 acres. The Town Council initially approached John Claudius Loudon, the leading landscape gardener of the time, but rejected his design. Instead they organised a competition won by William Rogers, a local nurseryman. The cemetery opened in May 1846 as a ten-acre site and was extended by five further acres in 1863. A third phase, added in the early 1880s, brought the cemetery to its present extent of 27 acres and introduced an avenue of yew trees. The cemetery includes three listed Grade II mortuary chapels: one for the Church of England, one for the Jewish community, and one for Nonconformists.

The eastern gate piers are thought to form part of the third phase extension and first appear on the Ordnance Survey map of 1897. They have group value with other listed cemetery structures including the Lodge (possibly by J and J Francis, 1848–1882), the main gates and gate piers (around 1880), the walls to the east side fronting Hill Lane (mid-nineteenth century), and the Pearce Memorial by sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas (1861). Southampton Cemetery is included in the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest. The cemetery contains an estimated 116,800 burials.