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“If there’s a model 21st-century cemetery, this is it.” The new flagship chapel, mausoleum and cemetery at the edge of Letchworth Garden City forms part of the city’s wider green spaces strategy and provides local amenity space as well as burial provision. Wilbury cemetery will eventually cover some 7.9 hectares. Following community consultation the site was designed to accommodate various alternatives for burial, such as eco-burials, ashes plots, child graves, family plots and niche internments.
The relationship between the rural setting and the proximity of the historically important Garden City of Letchworth was the starting point for the proposed site development. The cemetery takes its landscaping cues from the field patterns bordered by hedges or sometimes copses of trees. These form a variety of spaces of differing character, some to be forested, some to be meadows, some lawns and one civic hard landscaped area with raised herb bed planting adjacent to the chapel and mausoleums.
The chapel building comprises two main volumes. A generous sheltered porch allows for grouping of burial parties and leads to a top lit lobby and office. The lobby acts as a transition space to the main hall, which offers a framed view out towards the landscape.
The main hall is set at a slight angle to the volume of the entrance and office building. The cue for this slight shift in geometry came from observations of the way in which the agricultural barns in Bedford are grouped together. A colonnaded mausoleum forms an enclosed courtyard. Materials are blue grey brick, larch and zinc.
Project facts Related publicity Good Grief, Steve Rose, The Guardian [art & architecture] In Sympathy, 'Think Brick' case study, 2007 Necropolis now, Hugh Pearman, RIBA Journal, April 2007 Defying gravity, Matt Weaver, The Guardian, 17 May 2006 New cemetery with wider community benefits |
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