As many readers may know, the three-acre site at the bottom of Cowgate which is now the city’s busiest roundabout was, in Victorian and Georgian times, a burial ground.
Known as the Parish Burial Ground, it was first used in 1805 when the lay-persons cemetery on the north side of the Cathedral became overcrowded.
Like many other cemeteries during the 1800s, the graveyard was targeted by grave-robbers, who found selling on dead corpses to medical schools a financially lucrative pursuit.
While the Parish Burial Ground stopped accepting new burials in the late 1850s, it remained open for the public to tend graves.
The site became less relevant in subsequent years until in the 1970s, all visible memories of it disappeared from public view forever when the new Queensgate development reimagined the area for good.
Luckily for us, our good friends at Peterborough Images Archive still retain a number of evocative images which enable us to see just what the burial ground looked like in centuries past.
1. What Peterborough's old Parish Burial Ground used to look like
Recently unearthed skeletons have reminded us that, long before it was a road junction, the site of the Queensgate roundabout was a burial ground. Photo: Peterborough Images Archive
2. What Peterborough's old Parish Burial Ground used to look like
Like many cemeteries during the Victorian and Georgian eras, the Parish Burial Ground was targeted by opportunistic grave robbers, who would profit from selling freshly-buried corpses to medical schools. Photo: Peterborough Images Archive
3. What Peterborough's old Parish Burial Ground used to look like
The Parish Burial Ground stopped accepting new burials in the late 1850s, but remained open for members of the public to tend to graves. Photo: Peterborough Images Archive
4. What Peterborough's old Parish Burial Ground used to look like
The site remained largely unchanged for the subsequent four decades, before a number of gravestones were removed in 1911 for a road redevelopment. Photo: Peterborough Images Archive