♫ Keats & Yeats are on your side ♫
How many mothers do you know who take their kids to the cemetery on a Saturday afternoon? Well, now you do. Regular readers of my erstwhile blog will be well aware of my documented love of graveyards. For a while now I have been itching to explore this place. Anfield Cemetery. So Saturday afternoon armed with my new DSLR I took myself and the fam off to practice my shots and absorb the atmosphere. Situated a stones throw from where I grew up in a very well known area of Liverpool. Anfield Cemetery is a fine example of Victorian municipal architecture. One of 3 cemeteries commissioned by the Corporation of Liverpool to service the growing need for burial ground which was squeezing the town centre. The first burial took place here in 1863. A few months ago I attended this cemetery for the funeral of a family friend which reignited my interest in it. I couldn't believe that this huge space so full of history was right on my doorstep for so long and I never appreciated it. I never hung around after dark drinking cider and reading poetry on the gravestones. I put this down to spending most of my adolescence barely moving from my bedroom and feeling no connection whatsoever to my surroundings.
But time heals and today I saw my old territory through different eyes. I enjoyed being in this unusual location where the sense of quietude and space is palpable despite being right in the heart of the inner city. Particularly impressive, minus the inane and barely literate graffiti, are the cemetery gates. Solid and imposing in sandstone and wrought iron. Shame I could only capture their splendour in vignettes as it was a match day and there were cars parked right up to the outer entrance.