Mill Road Cemetery
A Grade II listed cemetery of 1848 off Mill Road, with notable Cambridge graves and a City Wildlife Site.
Mill Road Cemetery lies off Mill Road in Petersfield. The site has held Grade II listing since 2001, and a number of its tombs have their own listings for architectural and historical interest.
Why it exists
The cemetery opened in 1848 on land that used to be a cricket ground. It served 13 city parishes whose churchyards had filled, a figure now reduced to 10 by amalgamation. A chapel by George Gilbert Scott was pulled down in 1954, and an outline of it in carved stone, completed in 2017, marks where it stood. No more burials take place, and the City Council looks after the site.
Who is buried here
Many of those buried here shaped Cambridge's university and town. They include the mathematician Arthur Cayley, the physicist Sir George Stokes, the astronomer James Challis, the surgeon George Murray Humphry and the retailer Robert Sayle, whose name lives on in Robert Sayle. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission looks after the war graves here: 33 from World War I and four from World War II.
Wildlife and the walk
The cemetery is also a City Wildlife Site, with more than 110 plant species recorded, at least 35 bird species and 23 butterfly species. In 2014 the Bird Stones sculpture, one wooden and six stone columns by Gordon Young, was installed to celebrate the birds. There are three ways in: off Mill Road itself, via Norfolk Street, or across the Gwydir Street industrial estate. The Friends of Mill Road Cemetery website carries biographies of many of the people buried here.
Nearby
Within a few minutes' walk
