Bristol's forgotten cemetery - the hidden history of burial site

Eugene Byrne pays a visit to Bristol's forgotten cemetery, the last resting place of thousands of mostly working-class people, and meets the volunteers working to reclaim it from nature - and reclaim some of its stories as well.

- Eugene Byrne

If you live in the Fishponds/Eastville area, or have ever lived there, you might know about the Ridgeway Park Cemetery, sometimes simply known as the Ridgeway Cemetery.

But you might not. Even though it backs onto Eastville Park and its lake, it’s rather hidden away, and if you do know of it, you might not realise how big it is. The size of the place isn’t immediately obvious until you go in and find that most of it is very, very overgrown.

Ridgeway Park is Bristol's forgotten cemetery, despite being the last resting place of thousands of Bristolians who were buried here, or whose cremated ashes were interred or scattered here, for well over a century.

Forgotten also, perhaps, because most of those commemorated here were from the surrounding neighbourhood, a working-class area where few of the city’s elite lived. Unlike other Bristol cemeteries dating from Victorian times - Arnos Vale, Greenbank or Avonview, for instance - it has hardly any grand grave monuments.

Forgotten, too, perhaps because of all the changes in its neighbourhood in the last 50 or so years. There are some residents whose families have lived in surrounding streets for decades, but not many now. Most of with relatives interred here have long since moved elsewhere.

The cemetery was not, at first, owned and run by the council, but by a private company - The Ridgeway Park Cemetery Company. It was registered in 1887 and purchased 12 acres of land from the estate surrounding the nearby Ridgeway House (which was demolished in the 1930s). The owner of Ridgeway House, Thomas Wood, was one of the original directors.

The first burial, James Cole of Eastville, who died aged 31, took place on September 9 1888.

From then on, business was steady, though the burial records tell us that its busiest period was in the first half of the 20th century.