The Cemetery Project
The Rectory Lane Cemetery Project is the flagship project of the Friends of St Peter’s, transforming our once-neglected historic church cemetery into a community space and conserving our heritage for future generations.
Rectory Lane Cemetery is a ‘detached’ cemetery of St Peter’s Church. It was founded in 1842 with a gift of land from Charlotte Catharine Anne, Countess of Bridgewater, when St Peter’s churchyard ran out of space for new burials.
After the initial gift of one acre the cemetery was extended twice, until it too ran out of space for burials. A new municipal cemetery opened in 1946 at Kingshill and burials at Rectory Lane ended in 1976. However, ashes can be interred into family plots and, with those of people without family plots as part of the new Garden of Remembrance.
Military graves