Cemetery chapels, gateway and boundary walls to Blandford Cemetery, Blandford Forum, Dorset

Summary

A pair of cemetery chapels, entrance gateway and boundary walls, dating from 1855, by James B Green of Blandford.

Description

A pair of cemetery chapels, entrance gateway and boundary walls, dating from 1855, by James B Green of Blandford.

MATERIALS
Local rock-faced, squared and coursed stone and ashlar for the chapels and gatepiers, the buildings under plain clay tile roofs with fishscale details; the boundary walls are brick, with stone capping.

PLAN
The cemetery occupies an irregular plot at a prominent road junction, with roads to the south and west sides. The entrance is from Salisbury Road, to the south. This frontage is occupied to the right by the former cemetery superintendent’s house (not included in this assessment), and slightly left of centre by the recessed, curving entrance way. A central path leads from the entrance to an oval with the two cemetery chapels facing each other across a central green, defined by symmetrical paths. A war memorial now stands on the green. The cemetery surrounds the buildings on all sides. Boundary walls extend along both road fronts and the eastern boundary, as far as the return at the western side of Davis Gardens. A secondary entrance has been created at the north-western corner of the extended area.

EXTERIOR
The chapel exteriors are Gothic in style, with lancet windows with roll mouldings and plain block stops to the drip moulds. The Anglican and non-Conformist chapels are identical externally except for the addition of a bellcote and circular cross finial to the Anglican chapel, where the former non-Conformist chapel has tapering finials with small cross terminals. Each is of three bays, with deep roofs with fishscale tile details and pierced ridge tiles, with raised, coped verges and carved kneelers. The bay structure is expressed by buttresses with two offsets. The long elevations have paired lancet windows to the outer bays, and a single lancet between them. The liturgical east ends have triple lancets, extending up into the gables. The entrance fronts have a pointed-arched double doorway and plate tracery window above, with three lancets of equal height below a circular window with quatrefoil tracery.

ANGLICAN CEMETERY CHAPEL
INTERIOR
The roof structure has high, paired scissored collars with arch bracing and a short king post to the ridge, all chamfered, springing from stone corbels, with single purlins. The ceiling is laid with herringbone timber above the common rafters. The window openings are splayed internally; the windows have plain, diamond-pattern glazing with ventilation hoppers in the central windows. The chapel has hexagonal stone tiles to the floor. The walls have upright matchboard panelling to dado height. The pews date from 1855, and are set on the side walls rather than facing east. They have panelled fronts and ends, moulded top rails and shaped dividers to the seating. Circular brass chandeliers with chain and pendant details light the space.

FORMER NON-CONFORMIST CEMETERY CHAPEL
INTERIOR
The roof structure has high, paired scissored collars with arch bracing and a short king post to the ridge, all chamfered, springing from stone corbels, with single purlins. The ceiling is laid with herringbone timber above the common rafters. The window openings are splayed internally; the windows have plain, diamond-pattern glazing with ventilation hoppers in the central windows. The chapel has hexagonal stone tiles to the eastern half of the floor, with concrete beyond. The western half of the building has been subdivided horizontally. All fittings have been removed. Lightweight internal partitions have been set up.

SUBSIDIARY FEATURES
The entrance way is marked by four Gothic stone piers, of ashlar and rock-faced stone, set on a curve, creating a lenticular forecourt. The outer pair of piers is circa 2m in height, with pyramidal caps in four courses. Between these and the taller gatepiers, with tall, octagonal pointed caps and an offset in two courses, spear-headed railings stand on a dwarf wall with a plinth. The cemetery is bounded to the south and west, and in part to the east, by walls of brick, dating from circa 1855 (that part towards the northern end of the Higher Shaftesbury Road boundary added in the C20 to encompass the extension to the cemetery), varying in height slightly but around 1.5m high. The walls are double-skinned, with regular pilaster buttresses, and rounded capping bricks. An example from a fallen section of wall has an impressed heart as a maker’s mark.

History

Blandford Forum’s municipal cemetery was established on land purchased from Lord Portman for £500 in August 1850, in the parish of Pimperne, as part of a movement to relieve the pressure which had been growing from the early C19 on overcrowded urban churchyards, causing health hazards. In some larger cities, private companies began building new cemeteries, but there was no widespread response until after a Royal Commission of 1842 recommended that urban churchyards should be closed, and new, publicly-funded cemeteries built for municipal use. New burial acts in 1852 and 1853 meant that the closure of overcrowded and insanitary churchyards could be ordered by the privy council, and borough councils obliged to provide cemeteries.

Blandford Forum’s cemetery and its buildings, laid out on the former site of the Blandford Maze (destroyed 1730) were designed by James B Green, an architect and surveyor with a practice in the town. Green designed a number of buildings in Dorset in the C19, including Portman Lodge, 77 Christchurch Road in Bournemouth (circa 1873, for Lord Portman, listed Grade II), and a school for Okeford Fitzpaine (1872-3, unlisted). He also restored and largely rebuilt the Church of St Peter in Pimperne (1873-4, listed Grade II*). Green’s plans for the cemetery and the pair of chapels survive, showing that the cemetery was laid out with its main entrance in the southern boundary, a recessed, curving entrance with piers and railings, and a straight path leading to a formal oval green, the paired cemetery chapels – one for Anglican burials, the other for non-Conformists – facing each other across the space. The indenture of the sale included a requirement to build a boundary wall. A superintendent’s house was constructed on the southern boundary, with its garden running parallel to the road. The total cost of erecting the buildings on the site was £1,800. The first burial took place on 16 June 1856, that of Edward Cable, aged just five years and eight months. The cemetery's then extent was consecrated in 1856 by the Bishop of Sarum (Salisbury).

The Anglican chapel was laid out with seating facing inwards from the sides, with a reading desk rather than an altar, representing worship prior to the changes prompted by the ecclesiological movement, which began to be felt from the 1840s, but was strongly resisted in Dorset through the 1850s and 1860s. Local people, supported by influential landowners, petitioned the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1867 against the reforms which had been promoted by successive Bishops of Salisbury. Change continued to be resisted, with the only concession being the removal of the reading desk and its replacement with an altar table (since reversed).

The cemetery was extended northwards in the first quarter of the C20, taking on its current form, though the tree line marking the original northern extent remains; the boundary wall was extended to encompass the extension, and a vehicular access created at the new northern corner. A war memorial was erected on the green between the chapels after the First World War. The cemetery is the site of a total of 85 Commonwealth War Graves, dating from the First and Second World Wars, and since. The non-Conformist chapel has been converted to a workshop for the cemetery, after a period as a mortuary in the 1960s. The Anglican chapel was subject to an arson attack in 2013, but the areas of damage were restored in 2014, and the layout returned to its 1855 appearance, with the reinstatement of the reading desk in place of the later altar table. A second house was added in the garden of the Superintendent's house after 1983. Two sections of the boundary wall on Higher Shaftesbury Road were damaged by vehicles in 2014. As part of the repairs, a mould was made to create capping stones to match the existing wall.

Reasons for Listing

The Anglican and former non-Conformist cemetery chapels, gatepiers, railings and boundary walls at Blandford Forum Cemetery, designed in 1855 by James B Green, are listed at Grade II, for the following principal reasons:

* Architectural interest: the chapels, by James B Green, are a good Gothic design, well-constructed and with neat detailing. Their modest size and restrained but accomplished style are well suited to their sombre purpose;
* Design interest: the careful grouping of the chapels, facing each other across a green aligned on the formal path from the well-designed entrance, creates a satisfying layout which makes the most of the landscape setting;
* Group value: the ensemble of paired cemetery chapels, gatepiers, railings and boundary walls are a functionally- and stylistically-related contemporary assemblage which together form a significant group;
* Historic interest: the Anglican chapel has an unusual interior ordering, with the seating along the side walls and a reading desk instead of an altar, which forms an important reminder of the resistance to the ecclesiological movement in the C19 in Dorset.

External Links

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