Bringing new life to Arnos Vale Cemetery
Educational workshops, outdoor cinema screenings, yoga and light-sabre battles foster connections in Bristol
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Arnos Value is an entrepreneurial cemetery. Founded in 1839, the Bristol General Cemetery Company profited from the overcrowding of inner city churchyards, during the population boom of subsequent decades. But struggling to cover maintenance costs as revenue from burials dwindled, the cemetery declined in the 1980s. A community group was formed to campaign for a secure future. In 1998 the cemetery lost its cremation license, the owners then handed over responsibility for locking the cemetery to community volunteers.
Bristol City Council became the owners in 2003, and a charitable trust has restored and developed the cemetery since then. It has benefits from over £3m of Heritage Lottery Fund funding. Arnos Vale Cemetery social enterprise runs several premises within the cemetery as commercial facilities, hosting a café alongside corporate events. The cemetery charges for educational workshops and visits, and sells ‘discovery boxes’ to aid classroom learning. A gift shop was opened with a grant from the Association of Independent Museums and uniquely the cemetery has a license for weddings and civil partnerships. It has hosted art installations and a community run, and HLF has recently funded an oral history project. In a single week in March 2016, the cemetery hosted yoga, pilates, jump fit and mindfulness sessions; as well as two outdoor cinema screenings, two guided walks, a pre-school morning for toddlers and a light-sabre battle. It also remains a working cemetery.
As Juliette Randall (Executive Director until 2016) explains:
“We need to be financially sustainable for the sake of the people of Bristol who fought to keep it open. What we do ultimately supports this. But some doesn’t. Education and public engagement doesn’t pay for itself. The drive is from charitable objectives — remembrance, recreation, heritage, wildlife and learning.
Unorthodoxy is a new thing — it has come from frustration in a lot of ways. Particularly in the early days, our survival was about capital restoration. The energy on the campaign was to save and rebuild. The mandate was to stay open, build profile, raise money. Since then we’ve said yes to everything. We took managed risks at small scale.”
Arnos Vale Cemetery represents a huge educational opportunity for Bristol. 300,000 people are buried there and the heritage assets include 25 listed monuments. For example, the dead include Mary Carpenter, a social reformer bringing education to the poor and imprisoned, George Miller who founded homes for orphans, and the first governor of Bristol Prison. But while entrepreneurial, Juliette is realistic:
“It would be great to get people in recovery, or ex-offenders, to come and engage with these historic battles. But things are more nailed down — less opportunity to take risks and be creative. In health they have a bit more scope, but not in local authorities. It would be nice to work with volunteers in a more structured way to contribute to well-being. But in the current economic climate, in order to provide services, it’s tough to grapple with commissioning. You need a track record and to provide outcomes evidence, and it’s tough to build up an evidence base.”
A recent project at the cemetery saw AHRC-funded academics combine technologies like augmented reality and Bluetooth sound installation with creative tour guides to create an experience for people to explore and confront local community attitudes to the end of life.
What is stunning is not the exceptional story of Arnos Vale Cemetery, but the scale and similarity of the challenge facing other cities across the UK. There are over 3,500 cemeteries in the UK that are over 100-years-old, and most large towns and cities have sizeable cemeteries comparable to Arnos Vale’s 45 acres. In some London boroughs including Newham and Kensington and Chelsea, around half of all open space comprises cemetery land. Yet ‘Friends of’ groups for cemeteries are rarely a strong voice in the direction of local plans and strategies.
The cemetery sector could benefit from stronger, professionalised infrastructure organisation at the national or regional scale to provide support and guidance and build networks. CABE’s (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) assessment in 2007 is even more relevant today, with shrinking local authority budgets to maintain some 1,800 cemeteries in council ownership:
Urban burial grounds in the 19th century were originally envisaged as public open spaces, and were professionally designed to be attractive places to visit in their own right. Today, many cemeteries are neglected, with little to attract anyone apart from those visiting specific burial plots. This lack of design, planning and ambition means that the potential health and environmental benefits of cemeteries are not being realised.
Arnos Vale Cemetery has extended this potential, showing that cemeteries play a role both in the contemporary social life of a city, and in highlighting the social history of those for whom the cemetery is their resting place. This combination lets us remember the original purpose of the cemetery: as a space which fosters connection between the living and the dead.
Further reading: Money — that’s what I want? Improving resilience in economically challenging times (PDF, 2.4MB)
