Flaybrick Memorial Gardens

Originally from Liverpool I moved to Birkenhead in 1982. It took me 33 years before I discovered the charm of Flaybrick. It began when I came across a photograph of an angel on the flickr website which interested me enough to make my first visit. I was hooked and have been a regular visitor ever since.

Birkenhead Cemetery opened in May 1864. It was called Flaybrick Hill Cemetery from 1956 and in 1996 renamed Flaybrick Memorial Gardens. Proposals for a cemetery were first discussed as early as 1842. At that time there were many public health issues including cholera which caused churchyard cemeteries to become overcrowded.

In 1841 Birkenhead and the surrounding areas had a small population, around 10,000, expanding to some 50,000 by 1861. This was in the main due to the building of new docks and the developing shipbuilding industry on the River Mersey.

The cemetery is the work of Edward Kemp one of the 19th century’s great landscape designers. Kemp is buried in the cemetery and his rather modest grave is always well-tended.

The cemetery buildings are the work of local architects Lucy and Littler who are also buried in Flaybrick. Covering 16.5 acres the cemetery was later extended to 26 acres. The cemetery is split into Church of England, Non-Conformist and Roman Catholic sections. Probably not something we would envisage nowadays.

The Church of England and Non-Conformists had a chapel situated near the Boundary Road entrance with a separate chapel building and cemetery entrance for Roman Catholics at the far end of the cemetery. Apparently at the time the Roman Catholics had to put up a bit of a fight to be included.

Unfortunately the cemetery suffered from neglect and vandalism over the years and the Roman Catholic chapel was demolished in 1971. A small memorial wall has been erected to mark the site.

The other chapel also suffered and the roof and imposing central spire were demolished. Funding from the local council and English Heritage has enabled the remaining structure to be restored, but considerable funds would be required for a full restoration.

Further outbreaks of vandalism occurred in the 80’s and 90’s with gravestones being pushed over, there is much work needed for them to be restored to an upright position.

The council groundsmen do reset the occasional headstone but it is a huge project and with local council funding pressures would more likely require external funding and manpower. There doesn’t appear to be much enthusiasm to progress this.

The cemetery is host to some 100,000 people in 10,000 graves. There are several unmarked mass burial graves some containing hundreds of people stacked up to five deep with just inches between the rows.

Many of Birkenhead’s wealthy and early founders are buried in Flaybrick, their graves adorned with fine monuments, crosses and tombs. At the other end of the spectrum there are graves marked with simple headstones and small wooden crosses.

Some headstones tell a sad tale of its occupant. Some almost a family history. Lots of the graves are tendered to regularly and have flowers and mementos placed on them. I often wonder how expensive some of these gravestones and monuments must have been and if the spouse used up a considerable portion of the family assets in memory of their loved one.

The cemetery grounds are maintained by a small team of council gardeners.

I must give a special mention to the “Friends of Flaybrick”. They are a group of volunteers, founded in 1993, who turn out twice a week to help maintain the grounds. The Friends also provide a grave search service and guided tours for a ridiculously low fee.

On a personal note the Friends recently traced for me the site of my partners great grandparents grave. The headstone was laying flat on the ground. They surprised me by kindly restoring it to an upright position. It now needs to be given a much needed clean up.

Here is a link to Friends website: https://flaybrick.org

When the covid restrictions began to impact our daily life I found the cemetery ideal for avoiding people and it increasingly became one of my go to places for the daily walks with my Labrador dog Guy.

As well as taking photographs I also enjoy trying out different pieces of kit. Especially that which I drooled over back in the day but was at the time way too expensive to purchase.

With the advent of eBay and the subsequent switch by most photographers to digital many of those dream items became affordable. My practice is to buy something, use it for a year or so, sell it on then acquire the next desirable thing.

I’ve found Flaybrick to be an ideal testing ground for the new acquisitions. A Hasselblad 500cm with 80mm lens are next up. I process all of my digital pictures in Lightroom Classic. For any conversions to mono I tend to use Nik’s Silver Efex 3. Film I get lab processed, scan the negatives myself as raw DNG files to process in Negative Lab Pro then Lightroom.

For this article I have stuck with mono only photos.

Here is a final section of pictures.

If you are interested in seeing more pictures of Flaybrick then here is a link to my flickr photostream: https://flickr.com/photos/151534002@N06/

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