On a sad day 25 years ago the gates of the historic Arnos Vale Cemetery, final resting place of nearly 300,000 of Bristol’s citizens, were about to be locked forever.
Amid news that the private owner, Bristol General Cemetery Company, had plans to sell off a large chunk of the land for housing, relatives of people buried in the badly-neglected graveyard were heartbroken and outraged by a call to dig up their loved ones’ bodies and rebury them somewhere else.
Visitors were greeted by a typed notice from chairman Tony Towner in March 1998, headed “Exhumation - a sad necessity”, telling them that the company had no money to maintain the cemetery and would be closing down. He said that, if people didn’t like it, they could opt to have their family members removed and interred elsewhere at a cost of around £2,000, blaming the graveyard’s demise on cut-price competition from two city council-run crematoria.
