Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds is

hailed as England's first municipal

graveyard and is the final resting

place of the great and the good from

the city's past. So why has it been

forgotten? Grant Woodward reports.

By Grant Woodward

IT is the place where renowned industrialists rub shoulders with unknown paupers - many of them sharing the same green cloak of bramble bushes and ivy.

The Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds is the final resting place for 180,000 Leeds folk whose lives span three centuries.

Veterans of the legendary Charge of the Light Brigade, firebrands of socialism and celebrated philanthropists are all gathered here, their graves often marked with impressive stone memorials.

Alongside them lie the so-called Guinea Graves, packed with the bodies of those who paid the equivalent of just over a pound to avoid the indignity of an unmarked grave.

These days much of the council-owned cemetery, opposite St James's Hospital, between Burmantofts and Harehills, is a tangle of saplings and undergrowth which in places threatens to overwhelm it.

Crowded

It is a far cry from the day it opened its gates for the first time on August 14, 1845 as a replacement for the old Leeds Parish Churchyard, which was so overcrowded with the dead that gravediggers were forced to smash coffins already in the ground to fit fresh caskets in the same grave.

But after...