As part of this year’s Bradford Literature Festival, we booked onto a twilight tour of the famous Undercliffe Cemetery. The haunting site overlooks the city and contains impressive Victorian funerary edifices and tombs, as well as areas of neglected dilapidation. There are also over 200 military graves from different conflicts in history. The site features memorably in the 1963 film of Billy Liar.
It’s hard not to reflect on humanity’s ambitions and the fleeting span of lifetimes as you contemplate the inscriptions and imagine the forgotten stories of the great and the good, the greedy and the vain, the humble and the tragic. In Victorian times Bradford was one of the richest cities in Europe because of the thriving textile industries; civic pride is evident as you wander across the enormous site. Six of the memorials have listed building status and the place is now run by the Undercliffe Cemetery Charity.
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