A series of long lines of slabs mark out burial plots as yet unoccupied, and accessible by paths. Movement around the crematorium is, however, also intended on foot whether visiting individual memorials or locales within the gardens of remembrance. What is striking is that this is a landscape currently near-free of the memorials and remains of the dead, and yet kept trim for future years and future decades. Likewise, on the way out, there are parking spaces to facilitate visits to as-yet unoccupied plots for cremation burials. Above you get a clear sense of the approach to the crematorium building along a new road and adjacent path. There is a new road with pavement on only one side, lighting and road-markings (double-yellow lines warding off random parking plus white lines marking out parking spaces. It is possible to walk in, but the principal emphasis is upon the driver. Looking at the front of Chester Crematorium – parking spaces dominate Entrance to the cemetery and crematoriumįirst-up, this is a clockwise drive-thru experience: cremation reflects our car and motorised hearse culture. Car culture of the as-yet unoccupied burial spaces and the circular route out of the cemetery behind the crematorium I will do this in the form of a photo-essay we each picture prompting a discussion as we go along. In so doing, we can appreciate the planned and the seemingly incidental but key dimensions to the crematorium and memorialisation within its garden of remembrance. I will then discuss the interaction with the juxtaposed surrounding industrial and residential landscape of Chester’s suburbs. Therefore, I want to consider the contexts in which the cremation process is taking place – looking outside the crematorium at both the designed memorial landscape and the facilities and dimensions associated the management of the space. A hearse leaving the crematorium via a circular route back to the entrance and Blacon Avenue ‘No Entry’: driving is carefully choreographed Thus, the new crematorium augments and transforms the existing cemetery space, including the incorporation of the old site of the crematorium, recognised as still a ‘sacred’ focus, within the existing garden of remembrance. This is because it is neither an old (19th or 20th-century) crematorium nor one recently built on a de novo site it is instead a recently built new crematorium adjacent to a pre-existing crematorium and cemetery. Looking at Chester crematorium offers an important case study for considering current architectural and landscape designs for the disposal and commemoration of the cremated dead in early 21st-century Britain. We are very grateful to the staff of the crematorium, particularly Wayne Atkinson, for generously giving up time and accommodating our visit, as discussed here. I recently visited with students on the MA Archaeology of Death and Memory to learn about the process of cremating the dead in modern indoor oven facilities followed by the crushing of the ‘cremains’ to create ‘ashes’ using a cremulator. The new Chester Crematorium is situated adjacent to its 1960s predecessor at the eastern edge of Blacon Cemetery, off Blacon Avenue, Chester. A view of Chester crematorium over the canal, under electricity pylons and (in the foreground0 under the abandoned railway bridge (now the Millennium Greenway cycle path from Chester through Blacon and Queensferry to Hawarden Bridge and Shotton.
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