Belfast City Cemetery, Falls Road, Belfast, County Antrim, BT12 6DE

Belfast City Cemetery Gateway, Falls Road, Belfast

This is an elaborate High Victorian Gothic Revival gateway dating from 1868, designed by English landscape designer and surveyor William Gay of Bradford and constructed by the local firm Monk & Co. It forms the principal entrance to Belfast City Cemetery on the west side of Falls Road. The wrought iron gates themselves were supplied by Cliff & Co. of Bradford. The gateway has group value with the other listed structures within the cemetery: the gate lodge, the fountains, and the listed vaults and memorials.

The entire site is enclosed by un-coursed, rock-faced basalt walling with cut-stone coping and cast-iron railings to the east. There are two entrance points: a principal gateway to the northeast and a smaller gateway to the southeast. Stone walling runs along the north, south and west boundaries. To the north of the principal gateway stands the Superintendent's house.

The principal entrance is formed by four gate piers, with the two central piers being the most architecturally elaborate. These are built of rock-faced basalt with sandstone dressings and support painted cast-iron gates. Each central pier is rectangular in plan at the base, with a projecting plinth to the first stage and a single-stage pedimented buttress to both the east and west faces. The second stage is hexagonal in plan, and the third stage terminates in a pinnacle with carved stone gablets and bosses. The two flanking side piers are simpler in form — rectangular in plan with a projecting plinth — and are capped with a square-plan obelisk decorated with carved stone gablets to each face, incorporating carved trefoils and bosses. An Ordnance Survey benchmark is carved into the base of the southern side pier. The two gate piers at the smaller southeast entrance follow the same design as the flanking side piers at the principal entrance: rectangular plan with projecting plinth and a square-plan obelisk cap with carved stone gablets, trefoils and bosses. The grounds are grassed and separated by concrete-paved pathways.

The cemetery was created in response to a severe burial crisis in rapidly expanding Victorian Belfast. The city's population grew from around 20,000 in 1800 to 70,000 by 1841, over 120,000 by 1871, and 385,000 by 1911 — by then the largest urban population in Ireland — driven overwhelmingly by industrial expansion and the mechanisation of what had previously been cottage industries. Existing burial grounds, including Shankill graveyard, Friar's Bush graveyard and the New Burying Ground on Clifton Street, were becoming severely overcrowded, a problem worsened by outbreaks of cholera and the Great Famine. The opening of a new Presbyterian cemetery at Balmoral only partially relieved the pressure.

In autumn 1865, Belfast Corporation accepted Thomas Sinclair's offer of 101 acres on the Falls Road, a site that at the time included the Falls Bleach Works. The arrangement was formalised under the Belfast Burial Ground Act of June 1866, and the purchase was completed in December of that year for £12,000, with an annual ground rent of £73 5s. 4d. Of the total site, 45 acres were designated as a cemetery, with most of the remainder becoming what is now Falls Park. On 25 January 1867, the Cemetery Committee of Belfast Corporation awarded the design contract to William Gay, who by then had considerable experience laying out cemeteries in Leicester, Bradford, Wigan and Lancaster.

The cemetery was designed to accommodate two categories of grave. Public graves remained the property of the Corporation and were intended for the city's poor, positioned on the fringes of the site away from general view. Proprietary graves could be purchased by individuals or institutions, were divided into different classes priced accordingly, and were located in the most prominent part of the cemetery where monuments could be erected.

The contract for constructing the boundary walls, laying out paths and roadways, and installing drainage was awarded to Monk & Co. on 1 August 1867, with a tender value of £8,700. A complication arose when it was found that the entrances — being part of a separate ironwork tender — were not included in this sum. Monk & Co. were given an additional £200 to cover the entrance works, and even with this addition their bid remained the lowest received. On 15 May 1868, Gay reported to the Committee that the section of the front boundary wall he had inspected was of superior quality to what the contract required, and he recommended an additional payment of £100 to ensure the remainder of the front wall was built to this higher standard, consistent with the specimen sections already completed at both entrances.

A significant dispute arose late in the planning process when Dr Patrick Dorrian, Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor, objected to the arrangements for the Catholic section of the cemetery. Under the plans as drawn, 15 acres would be set aside for Catholic burials — 10 acres for public graves and 5 acres for proprietary graves and a mortuary chapel. The bishop sought exclusive control over this section in order to consecrate it according to the rites of his Church, and also considered the area allocated insufficient for the city's Catholic population. No satisfactory resolution was reached, and as a result a separate Catholic cemetery — Milltown — was opened a short distance away on the opposite side of Falls Road in November 1869.

The name 'The Belfast Cemetery' was agreed on 29 September 1868, and the cemetery opened on 1 August 1869, with the first burials taking place three days later. A Jewish section was opened in 1871. The Superintendent's house was completed in 1873 to designs by John Lanyon. A mortuary chapel was built by Samuel Carson in 1874 and demolished in 1985. In 1912 the Glenalina extension was acquired, bringing the total size to 109 acres, with the first burial in the extension taking place in November 1915. On 28 May 1913, it was agreed that the cemetery would henceforth be known as Belfast City Cemetery. The entrance gates were vandalised in 1994 and subsequently repaired.