Local Government ExplainedCemeteries, history and heritage: Resources for local government
Sid Hayward, LGIU
Curated case studies on innovative ways councils are preserving and making use of cemeteries and graveyards, plus resources on the management and importance of cemeteries. Examples this week come from Scotland, Canada, Spain and Lithuania.
Curated case studies on innovative ways councils are preserving and making use of cemeteries and graveyards, plus resources on the management and importance of cemeteries. Examples this week come from Scotland, Canada, Spain and Lithuania.
Have your own example to share, get in touch!
Case studies on innovative uses of cemeteries
SCOTLAND: Council provides insight on historic graveyards as part of heritage tour
Aberdeenshire Council Archaeology Service works to maintain Aberdeenshire’s historic churches, but more than that, they actively encourage people to visit their historic ruined churches and associated graveyards, which are closed to new burials. The service operates a Historic Churches trail, which guides visitors to 12 historic churches and graveyards across Aberdeenshire, and by exploring the surrounding graveyards, the council hopes that visitors can better learn the stories of the parish, the people and events, their triumphs and tragedies. Within these graveyards, the council has also installed interpretation boards, which provide explanations for the various memento mori symbols found on gravestones, as well as a few profiles of some of those buried. Elsewhere, the trail goes into detail on the body snatching phenomenon where the graveyards have mort houses and mort safes. These graveyards fall under Aberdeenshire Council’s Historic Assets Management Project, which manages and maintains assets like the historic graveyards.
Aberdeenshire Council
CANADA: Cemetery doubles as community garden
The Surrey Heritage Garden in British Columbia, Canada, is a relatively new cemetery in the region, and offers a twist on the standard graveyard landscaping. It is home to beehives and a large vegetable garden, as part of a bid to create a unique connection with the community. The site was formerly a working farm, and since being bought by local residents, now hosts a pollinator meadow, vegetable patch, and other features from its past, all on the other side of the property far from the gravesites. What’s more, produce grown at the cemetery is offered as a gift to visitors.
Atlas Obscura
SPAIN: Spanish cemeteries harness solar power for renewable energy
Cemeteries offer quiet space for mourning and reflection, but at the same time are urban spaces that could be enlisted in the transition to clean energy without losing their purpose and importance. In Valencia, the city council launched an initiative to install 6,658 solar panels in its local cemeteries, as part of a bid to create the largest urban solar farm in Spain. Power generated from these panels will mainly be used for consumption in municipal buildings to improve the self-sufficiency of the local public sector, however 25% of it will also go to powering a thousand vulnerable households. Meanwhile, outside of Barcelona, the Santa Coloma De Gramanet cemetery has installed solar panels atop its mausoleums, making the most of the Mediterranean sun to produce clean energy. Local authorities found that most of the densely populated town was too shaded and hill to be of use for solar panels, with the exception of the cemetery. Now, 60 homes are powered by some 462 cemetery-based panels. Planners were sure to position the panels above ground level, ensuring no notable change to the cemetery itself for visitors.
Web Urbanist / The Mayor
LITHUANIA: Vilnius’ digital cemetery portal
The City of Vilnius is home to 43 cemeteries across the municipality. While usually quiet, on All Soul’s Day, 2 November, they often fill with people looking to honour the memory of relatives. To help its residents deal with busy crowds, the city has launched a digital map database of all the graves in its cemeteries. The database was launched following an extensive, 4-year digitalisation process, which employed drones to take photographs of each headstone and graves registered in both Cyrillic and Yiddish characters.
The Mayor
Resources on cemetery management
Article: Housing the dead: What happens when a city runs out of space?
Cemeteries in major Australian cities have worryingly short lifespans. In Greater Sydney, for example, the region’s 310,000 to 330,000 available plots will likely be filled by 2050, according to the NSW Department of Planning and Environment. This article from The Conversation explores where, and how, we should bury our dead in the coming decades.
Report: Urban cemeteries: The forgotten but powerful cooling islands
Graveyards, allotments and parks are three common urban green spaces, and with that common cooling islands. Yet they differ notably in their ‘thermal footprints’. This new report presents finding that cemeteries are the coolest of common urban green spaces, due to their frequently high tree age and the irrigation control surface cooling.
Resource: Management of Historic Cemeteries
This resource provides a range of advice on the management of cemeteries and other forms of historic burial grounds, such as churchyards. It includes conservation management plans, approaches to derelict cemetery buildings, and how cemeteries can be used as public spaces.
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