This Victorian cemetery in Glasgow, Scotland is on a low but very prominent hill to the east of Glasgow Cathedral (St. Mungo’s Cathedral). Fifty thousand individuals have been buried here. Typically for the period only a small percentage are named on monuments and not every grave has a stone. Approximately 3500 monuments exist here.
Following the creation of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris a wave of pressure began for cemeteries in Britain. This required a change in the law to allow burial for profit. Previously the parish church was responsible for burying the dead but there was a growing need to give an alternative solution. Glasgow was one of the first to join this campaign, having a growing problem, with fewer and fewer attending church. The Cemeteries Act was changed in 1832 and it opened in 1833. It was declared full in 1851.
Three modern memorials lie between the gates and the bridge: to stillborn children; to the Korean War; and Glaswegian recipients of the Victoria Cross.
The cemetery, like most early Victorian cemeteries, is laid out as an informal park, lacking the formal grid layouts of later cemeteries. This layout is further enhanced by the complex topography. The cemetery’s paths meander uphill towards the summit, where many of the larger monuments stand, clustered around the John Knox Monument.
The Glasgow Necropolis was described by James Stevens Curl as “literally a city of the dead”. Glasgow native Billy Connolly has said: “Glasgow’s a bit like Nashville, Tennessee: it doesn’t care much for the living, but it looks after the dead.”
Glasgow Necropolis holds graves of 19 Commonwealth service personnel, 15 from World War I and 4 from World War II, registered and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
