Key Hill Cemetery in Birmingham, West Midlands

About

Get directions Icknield Street
Birmingham, Metropolitan Borough of Birmingham, West Midlands B18 5 England

Coordinates: 52.49084, -1.91586
Cemetery ID:

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About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

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Key Hill Cemetery was opened in May 1836 in the Jewellery Quarter in Hockley, Birmingham. The cemetery was non-denominational and therefore favoured by non-conformists. It is the oldest cemetery, as opposed to churchyard, in Birmingham. The grounds were originally laid out for the Birmingham General Cemetery Company by local architect, Charles Edge.

The principal entrance is on Icknield Street to the west, with a secondary entrance on Key Hill to the north. The cemetery contains the graves of many prominent members of Birmingham society in the late 19th century, to the extent that in 1915 E.H. Manning called it, "the Westminster Abbey of the Midlands".

Many of its fittings and memorials are of architectural and artistic merit. A campaign group, the Friends of Key Hill & Warstone Lane Cemeteries, lobbies to have the cemetery restored. The entrance piers and gates on both Icknield Street and Key Hill have been restored in recent years.

Key Hill Cemetery contains 38 burials from the First World War, most of them in Section L. None of these graves are individually marked, the casualties being commemorated by name on a Screen Wall. There are also eight burials from the Second World War.

A comprehensive record of memorial inscriptions of existing memorials (and of some of those removed by Birmingham City Council) may be found on the Jewellery Quarter Research Trust's website.