The Ardwick Cemetery The Ardwick Cemetery
used to occupy a site near Hyde Road and Devonshire
Street behind the Nicholls Hospital building (marked A
in the image below) that today is the Nicholls Campus of
City College.
The cemetery opened in
1838 and can be seen in the map segment below, dated
1844. As you can see, at that time it was a simple
rectangular shape.
By 1953, the date of the aerial image below, the cemetery had expanded eastwards. The cemetery operated
until 1950 by which time some 80,000 people had been
buried within its grounds. Among the famous people
interred there was the scientist John Dalton. Such
was his reputation that after his death his body laid in
state in Manchester Town Hall and apparently 40,000
people filed past. It is said that on the day of
the funeral 100 coaches followed the funeral cortege
to Ardwick Cemetery. The statue of John Dalton,
that once stood in Piccadilly, is now located outside
the John Dalton Building of Manchester Metropolitan
Museum. Beside the statue, just visible on the
right of this photograph, is the granite top of
Dalton's tomb at Ardwick.
In the 1960s the site
was converted into sports fields called Nicholls
Field. A sign at the site, commemorating the
opening on June 16, 1966, lists the prominent people
buried in the cemetery.
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