THE words “mission field” have an extra dimension for the Revd Damian Platt, Vicar of Christ Church, Thornton, near Blackpool. He has the largest churchyard in the area, in a region where high numbers of people want to be buried, and he is pondering what the future holds for this aspect of the Church of England’s mission.
In the next four or five years, his churchyard will be full. It will then be closed to new burials and its upkeep will become the responsibility of the local authority
It is a transition that, for some incumbents and PCCs, brings undoubted relief. The right to be buried in the churchyard resides with all who live in the parish, as well as those on the church electoral roll. But Mr Platt receives an average of 30 enquiries a year from people living outside the parish wishing to have their loved ones buried here: requests which he has to deny because they don’t meet the criteria — but which demonstrates, he says, an ongoing desire for burials to take place in churchyards.
His parish is near the coast. Many people have happy memories of time spent around Blackpool and Morecambe and choose to retire here. So “Mum wanted to be buried here” and “We’d love Dad to be buried here” is a frequent refrain.
It costs the church £30,000 a year to maintain the churchyard, a sum offset by about £12,500 from fees, headstone applications, and reburials. A further £8000 had to be spent last year for work on some of the 145 trees.
“Much to my surprise, I have come to find the churchyard is — literally — a mission field in our parish, with thousands of memorials displaying the symbolism of death and resurrection,” says Mr Platt, who has been incumbent here for six years.
“We see hundreds of churchyard visitors during the week, and the love of the church family to those in the community is conveyed by the tender care of the graves, ground, grass, meadows, and trees of their loved ones. All of which conveys the beauty of the gospel.”
Traditional grave spaces are presently being created out of “working our way around all the grass paths we can use up”. There are an increasing number of ashes burials, and the columbarium wall is already full.
Reservations, for which a faculty is needed, have been made in the more distant past, and these must be honoured, but the PCC has an established policy of not allowing new reservations to be made.
It has been a busy time: a sudden flurry of deaths in 2020 meant the loss of 17 members of the congregation. Mr Platt reflects: “I have never come across a new church burial ground. When we hear of new house building, new estates, new communities being developed, we rightly hear of the need for new schools and GP surgeries, but not of the need for a new burial ground.
“I’m interested to know whether the Church of England is planning for what happens when its churchyards are full. If there isn’t a plan to purchase, develop, or set aside land for future burials needs, will this mean it will simply cease to offer burials on church land?”
As for the Church’s plans for growth: “A hundred years ago, church planting was certainly achieved by building a new church in a community, sometimes with a churchyard attached. If church planting has less of a focus on a physical building, is there a danger we will fail to plan for the need for future burials, and therefore find our churchyards full and with little availability of suitable land to purchase?”
FOR Muslims, who do not cremate bodies, and in whose communities there have been high death rates because of the pandemic, the problem is acute. The sharp surge mean that Handsworth cemetery, in Birmingham, became the first in the UK to close to Muslim burials, after reaching full capacity.
The event exposed the fact that there was no national data on the number of cemeteries in operation, how full they are, and the pressures faced by particular groups in particular locations.
Caring for God’s AcreOrchids at Ripon
The Burial and Cremation Advisory Group has been articulating the problem for nearly 20 years. For the moment, information is patchy: Bradford Council is reported to be pushing ahead with plans to expand its cemetery and create hundreds of new spaces. The same is happening in Batley; and 12,000 new burial spaces have been made available at Sutton New Hall Cemetery, in Birmingham.
The last attempt to obtain solid data was a Home Office report in 2007. Of the 9747 burial grounds which responded to its survey, 21 per cent were managed by the local authority, and 70 per cent were operated by the Church of England or the Church in Wales.
The small remainder were managed by other faiths or charitable trusts, or were woodland cemeteries or those where the authority could not be identified.
Sixty-four per cent of C of E burial grounds in the survey were open for new burials; just under 20 per cent were closed. Taken together, C of E and local authority burial grounds were approximately 80 per cent full, leaving 20 per cent of the space still unused. Thirty-six per cent of C of E burial ground was occupied by graves more than 100 years old.
The report gave the C of E and the Church in Wales 25 years until they were full — less time in urban districts, i.e. ten more years from now, to the year 2032.
In the absence of further data, the current data from the Church of England’s Buildings division is acknowledged to be “the best we can do”. There are 19,000 churchyards; 15,072 are recorded, of which about 1000 are recorded as being closed, but the figure is acknowledged as not reliable.
There are 972 recorded churchyard extensions, and 22 are closed — but, again, these figures are unreliable; 2793 cemeteries are on record, but it cannot be confirmed how many have a consecrated area.
THE alternative to finding new spaces is to re-use old ones. Guidance issued by the Chancellor of Southwark diocese in 2018 is clear: except where burial rights are subject to a particular period of years, “there should be an expectation that grave spaces will in due course be re-used.
“This is necessary to economise on land use at a time when grave space is a diminishing resource. This is an increasingly urgent problem which all those responsible for churchyards have to face. Sensitive solutions have to be devised and implemented.”
Headstones are the private property of those who paid for their erection, but the burial plot itself belongs to the Church of England. The guidance advises: “Re-use of graves within a period of less than 75 years is likely to cause distress and offence to the living, as well as appearing disrespectful to the dead.
“But incumbents should promote and publicise policies for the re-use of graves as soon as 75 years have elapsed after the most recent burial therein, not least so that those presently arranging a burial are informed of what is likely to happen in the future.”
It will “always be appropriate to consult with any surviving relatives who can be traced”.
The last available plot at St Mary’s, North Aston, was used in 2018. Since then, the church has been assessing grave sites that have not been used within 100 years in order to re-site headstones and re-use space — a practice that has been carried out here previously. The headstones are lined along the outer wall.
If there is a grave without a headstone, it can be re-used if records can be found. If there are headstones but no records, these graves more than 100 years old can be re-used, but that intention must be publicly announced, and any descendants sought. It is a policy that St Mary’s has been following with since 2019.
The process of re-using grave plots is called “lift-and-deepen”. Remains are carefully exhumed and buried deeper in the grave, soil added, and the new burial placed on top.
An archaeologist is generally present. In 2018, St Mary the Virgin, Tutbury, in Staffordshire, began re-using graves in its older churchyard which were more than 150 years old and where there was no known headstone. It estimated at that time that there was just five years’ worth of burial space left, and reckoned that the additional space would allow for approximately 15 years of burials to continue.
The C of E’s head of church buildings strategy, Dr Joseph Elders, said: “Most new churches do not have an adjacent burial ground because they are mostly in urban settings. Demand for burial in consecrated ground rather than by cremation and/or in local authority non-consecrated space is thought to be declining, but we do not have a full statistical picture.”
“There has been some pressure to reopen ‘closed’ churchyards, which means closed for new burials by Order of Privy Council. They are full of monuments, which would perhaps in the past have been cleared after a period of time for new burials. There is no immediate solution to this. It would require a big change in thinking.”
THE Church in Wales has been wrestling with the issue of churchyard burials since 1920, when it was disestablished. Indeed, says Alex Glanville, the head of property services, burial grounds were at the root of the problem.
“The driving force around disestablishment was the way that Anglican churches were burying non-Anglicans in the wrong place, or not burying non-Anglicans,” he says. “Burial grounds were the place where ‘this awful Church of England’ met the local community and ‘weren’t very nice to them’.”
St Beuno’s, Berriew, in Montgomery
The plan was that all the burial grounds would go under local authority control, i.e. not owned by the Church in Wales. But the local authorities opposed that plan, and so, in 1920, they were held by the Welsh Church Commissioners pending the sorting out of who was going to have them. It took until 1945, when the Welsh Church Burial Ground Act transferred all of them to the Church in Wales.
“It was a very emotive issue,” Mr Glanville acknowledges. “What happened was that we said we would take them on, and never discriminate about who got buried there. It indicates how tricky the problem was then, and how tricky it perhaps still is.”
The Church in Wales was warning of a graveyard crisis as long ago as 2010. Its 1053 burial grounds are maintained by parochial parish councils. With a quarter already full in 2010, and 43 per cent with fewer than 20 spaces remaining, it warned that two-thirds were set to run out of space by 2020, and asked for help from the Welsh Assembly and local authorities.
The Church proposed that, once closed for burials, a churchyard should be maintained at public expense by community councils or local authorities, as in England. Mr Glanville described churchyards “a unique repository of information about our past” which, without help, would fall into disrepair, since fees did did not cover the costs of looking after them. The Church estimated that its churchyards needed £16-million worth of work to be done, but had only £3.6 million held in reserves to meet those costs.
It raised the issue with Assembly election candidates the following year, when it called for a government commission to look at the provision of burial space in Wales. It repeated the exercise in 2013, but with no success. Nothing has fundamentally changed, and there are no further accurate statistics on burial space because there are no centralised records, and no system for recording what spaces are left.
“There have been virtually no new burial grounds or extensions to existing ones established over the last decade, because we discourage it unless there is clear financial support from the local authority or community council,” Mr Glanville said last week. “I have no reason to doubt that the prediction a decade ago is now the case. There’s been no wider Commission to look at the issue.
“The key point is that, once the burial ground is full and closed to new burials, there is no right in Wales for the maintenance of those grounds to be passed to local authorities.
“This means that an increasing number of burial grounds have virtually no income — because there are no burials — but remain the responsibility of the local church council. This will inevitably mean that maintenance of these grounds will be increasingly challenging for them.”
A handful of churches in the past ten years have managed to extend their churchyard with the purchase of additional land. One is St Beuno’s, Berriew, in Montgomery, where the church was left land by a landowner, and also won some support from the community council.
Mr Glanville reflects: “It’s the way it has to be. Trying to get that perfect moment when land is needed, we can identify it, and it can be funded doesn’t happen very often. It’s such a local issue that it never gets prominence. We’re talking about little burial grounds, mostly in rural places, which don’t get the attention city-centre graveyards do.
“It’s easier with cremated remains, but, in rural places, burial is still very much the tradition, and it’s a harder and harder thing to achieve. . . I think it’s a shame, as I think it’s part of our service to local communities.”
The Church in Wales is reviewing its whole fees structure this year, and Mr Glanville considered that a potential increase in fees would be helpful, up to a point. “If you’re not getting any burials, you’re not getting any fees, but it might make it more feasible to consider creating additional space because there is a stream of income coming in.
“But, equally, that hits families who want to bury their loved ones. It’s always a balancing act. It’s a societal problem, and society needs to decide what its priorities are, but I don’t think we’re going to get any big scale government change.”
THESE days, the number of cremations far exceeds the number of burials. In England and Wales in 2020, they accounted for 78.05 per cent. As it reckoned that one burial space can accommodate the ashes of eight people, this will ease the problem a little.
The charity Caring for God’s Acre points out that churchyards are some of the oldest, least disturbed plots in the country, resulting in the abundance of species that characterise so many.
All answers to their future rely on the collection of solid data — something that will be aided when the Church Heritage Records graveyard mapping project is complete.
Stage one of the project to record all 19,000 churchyards is already under way, in an agreement with the digital mapping company, Atlantic Geomatics (News, 21 February 2020, 3 September 2021).
It involves the use of a specialised backpack, which takes thousands of measurements each second as its wearer walks through the churchyard. It also stores photographs of gravestones. Funded by Historic England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and Caring for God’s Acre, among others, it will have completed its work by 2026. Meanwhile, the debate goes on, with increasing urgency.