St James Cemetery, Bath

The cemetery opened in 1861 as Lyncombe & Widcombe’s fourth graveyard and the second graveyard for St James. It was administered by a burial board. The first burial occurred on 27 Nov 1861. It was consecrated on 6 Jan 1862 (Bath Chronicle Thu 9 Jan 1862). There were about 200 burials per year until its closure in 1937, being superseded by Haycombe cemetery, the numbers buried then falling rapidly. There were over 24,000 burials and there are more than 1,900 surviving memorials.

Bath Record Office’s Bath Burial Index (https://www.batharchives.co.uk/) has online documentation produced by Phil Bendall for this cemetery including its history, images of the memorials, transcriptions of the inscriptions and overall and section maps. The records include all those buried, not just those (about 20 per cent) with memorials.

Although commonly known at ‘St James’, the cost of its construction was split between the wards of Lyncombe & Widcombe (61%) and St James (39%) (Bath Chronicle Thu 28 Jul 1859).