The Necropolis

Behind Glasgow Cathedral, on a steep hill across the old Molendinar ravine, stands the city’s greatest monument to itself: the Necropolis, a Victorian ‘city of the dead’ where some fifty thousand Glaswegians lie beneath the grandest collection of funerary architecture in Scotland. It was the place where wealthy nineteenth-century Glasgow chose to be remembered — a hill of temples, obelisks and mausoleums climbing towards the statue of John Knox that crowns the summit — and it remains one of the most atmospheric places in the city.

This page tells its story: the merchants’ wooded park that became a cemetery, the great column raised before a single grave was dug, the garden-cemetery movement that inspired it, the ornate bridge by which the dead were carried across, the architects and sculptors who filled it with their finest work, and the people, of every faith, who lie there.

The Fir Park

The hill east of the cathedral had belonged, since the seventeenth century, to the Merchants’ House of Glasgow, the ancient corporation of the city’s traders. They had held the ground since about 1650 and planted it with Scots fir trees, and it was known as the Fir Park; when the firs died away in the early 1800s it was replanted with elm and willow and laid out as a pleasant wooded walk, an ornamental park on one of the highest points in the town, looking across the ravine of the Molendinar Burn to the medieval cathedral opposite. It was a beautiful and prominent piece of ground with, as yet, no particular purpose — and the Merchants’ House, a charitable body always in need of income, began to wonder what might be made of it.

John Knox on his column

The first thing raised on the hill was not a grave but a monument. In 1825, eight years before any burial, a great Doric column designed by the architect Thomas Hamilton was set on the summit, carrying a statue of John Knox, the stern leader of the Scottish Reformation, gazing out over the city whose religion he had remade. It was erected by public subscription as a tribute to Knox and to the Reformation, and it still crowns the whole composition, the highest point of the city of the dead. There is an irony in it that Glaswegians enjoy: Knox himself is not buried here, nor anywhere near it — he lies far away in Edinburgh — and his column stood alone on the empty hill for years before the cemetery gathered around its feet. The John Knox Monument remains the centrepiece of the whole Necropolis.

A garden for the dead

The idea of turning the Fir Park into a cemetery belonged to the age. Across Europe, the old practice of burial in cramped, overcrowded and insanitary town kirkyards was giving way to a new fashion: the spacious, landscaped ‘garden cemetery’ on the edge of the city, of which the great exemplar was Père Lachaise in Paris. In 1831 John Strang, an official of the Merchants’ House, published a pamphlet, Necropolis Glasguensis, arguing that Glasgow should have such a place — dignified for the dead, healthier for the living, and profitable for the charitable House that owned the ground. A change in the law in 1832 that allowed burial grounds to be run for profit cleared the way, and the Merchants’ House set about transforming its park.

The grounds were laid out with winding carriage drives climbing the slope, and the cemetery took the name that captured its ambition — the Necropolis, the city of the dead. It opened for burials in 1833, one of the earliest of the great Victorian garden cemeteries in Britain. From the very start it was founded on an unusually broad principle: it was open to people of every religious denomination and none, at a time when that was rare, and it is often described as one of the first cemeteries of its kind established on such an interdenominational basis. Fittingly, its very first burial, in 1832, before the formal opening, was that of a Jewish jeweller, Joseph Levi, in the separate Jewish burial ground that had been laid out on the hill.

The Bridge of Sighs

To reach the new cemetery from the cathedral, mourners had to cross the ravine of the Molendinar, and so the Merchants’ House built a handsome bridge, designed by the architect David Hamilton and completed in the 1830s, around 1836. Because it carried funeral processions from the world of the living to the city of the dead, it was named, after the famous bridge in Venice, the Bridge of Sighs. Passing beneath its arch and up the hill beyond became the great set-piece of a Glasgow funeral, and it remains the formal main entrance, an ornate arch and gate, to the Necropolis today: a threshold, quite deliberately, between one city and another.

An open-air museum

What the wealthy of Victorian Glasgow built on the hill amounts to an open-air museum of nineteenth-century architecture in miniature. Competing to be remembered in the grandest style, the city’s merchant and industrial families commissioned monuments from the finest architects and sculptors of the day — among them Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, Charles Wilson, J. T. Rochead, David Hamilton and the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh, with much of the carving the work of the sculptor John Mossman. The result is a crowded hillside of Greek temples and Egyptian vaults, soaring obelisks and Celtic crosses, classical urns and Gothic spires, several thousand monuments in all, jostling for position up the slope.

Some are extraordinary. The mausoleum of Major Archibald Douglas Monteath is a strange and striking circular temple, modelled on medieval round churches; the tomb of the traveller William Rae Wilson wears an exotic, half-Eastern air; and everywhere the visitor finds the confident, sombre, sometimes eccentric taste of a city with money to spend on eternity. Only a fraction of those buried here have monuments at all, but those that exist make the Necropolis one of the most important collections of funerary art in Britain.

Who lies here

Around fifty thousand people are buried on the hill, and the names on the grander monuments read like a directory of the Victorian city. Here lie the chemical and manufacturing dynasties — the Tennants of the great St Rollox works among them — along with shipbuilders and engineers, merchants and publishers, ministers and theatre managers, and a long roll of the city’s Lord Provosts. Among the most loved graves is that of the poet William Miller, who wrote ‘Wee Willie Winkie’, and John Strang, whose pamphlet had called the whole place into being, lies here too.

But the hill is not only a monument to the rich. Its founding openness to all faiths is written into the ground in the early Jewish burial enclosure, and later generations added memorials of a different kind — to stillborn children, to those lost in war, and to ordinary Glaswegians who could never have afforded a mausoleum. For all its grandeur, the Necropolis is in the end a record of a whole city’s dead, and of how that city chose to remember them.

Decline & revival

In 1966 the Merchants’ House handed the Necropolis to the City of Glasgow, and, like so much of the old city around it, the cemetery passed through hard decades in the later twentieth century, suffering neglect, weathering and vandalism as its Victorian families died out and the burials dwindled. Its revival has been one of the quiet successes of the modern city. Cared for now by the council and its park rangers and championed by the energetic Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, founded in 2005, it has seen monuments repaired through careful restoration and its story retold to a new public through a programme of guided walks and tours that are among the best free things a visitor can do in Glasgow.

To climb it today is to read the whole city at once. From the summit by Knox’s column, the view takes in the medieval cathedral immediately below, Provand’s Lordship and the oldest quarter beyond it, the East End and the river valley stretching away — the living city and its city of the dead laid out together, exactly as the Victorians intended.

What to see