The Cemetery Lodge and Chapels

In 1853, the law regarding where people could be buried changed and allowed people to buried away from churchyards.  In Bishops Stortford, this allowed the forerunner of the present Town Council to open in 1855 a cemetery at the far end of Apton Road, then on the outskirts of the town.  The churchyards at St Michael’s and the recently opened All Saints’ Churches, along with smaller areas at the Baptist and Congregational Chapels and a Quaker burial ground on Newtown Road, were no longer to be used for burials.  The new cemetery could be used for the burial of people of all faiths  – St Michael’s had been in principle restricted to members of the Church of England. This was important as town had by then quite a significant non-conformist community.

The new cemetery was provided with a lodge, for the custodian, and two identical mortuary chapels, facing each other across the entrance road, one for use in Church of England burials and the second for use in Nonconformist services.  These buildings were designed by the noted local architect George Edward Pritchett and was one of his earlier commissions.

The chapels are in a perpendicular style, with flint-faced walls.  This was perhaps an idiosyncratic touch as this building material was no longer in general use.  The chapels also have rough granite banding, limestone dressings and steep pitched roofs with slate tiles.  The front gable end has a Tudor style door.   

East Mortuary Chapel (Church of England)

West Mortuary Chapel (Nonconformist)

In contrast, the lodge is a more picturesque design, in a Tudor style, with flint walls and limestone dressings around the windows and doors, a dominant four- square brick chimney stack and a steep pitched slate roof, with an asymmetric appearance, unlike the symmetry of the chapels.  The three buildings are Grade II listed.

Cemetery Lodge

The East chapel (formerly the CoE chapel) is still used for burial services whilst the west chapel has been de-commissioned and is now used for storage.  The lodge was for the home of the Local History Society’s museum from 1979 to 2000, when it merged with the Rhodes collection at what is now South Mill Arts and consolidated on this site to form the present-day Bishops Stortford Museum.

Pritchett also provided a design for a pair of cemetery chapels at Tottenham, in 1856, his only commission in the Greater London area.  Interestingly, a new cemetery was opened in Saffron Walden in 1857, but in this case, the chapels were designed by another Pritchett, his cousin James Pigott Pritchett, who was based in Darlington, in a rare foray south.  His father was also James Pigott Pritchett (“Yorkshire’s Architect”?), a prominent architect based in York.  In spite of this family relationship, it appears that George did not spend any time training / working with either his uncle or his cousin.

Amongst the prominent local people buried in the Cemetery are Sir Walter Gilbey and members of his family and Sir John Barker and members of his family, as well as several War graves.  Pritchett however was buried in a family plot at St Mary’s Church, Little Hallingbury, where his father had been Rector.