Site Event/Activity record ECH6862 - Former Unitarian Chapel, Trinity Street, Chester: Rapid Desk-based Assessment

An enhanced archaeological desk-based assessment was undertaken in 2017 as part of the Chester Northgate development project. The aim of the work, which built upon the results of an assessment completed in September 2017 (ECH6861, R4453), was to collect and evaluate as much information as possible pertaining to the burial ground of the former Unitarian Chapel on Trinity Street, Chester, the site of which lies wholly within the development footprint, in order to determine, as accurately as possible, the number of burials that were made within the graveyard. The assessment then sought to determine how many of these burials had been subsequently destroyed by modern groundworks, in order to provide as accurate an estimate as possible of the number of burials that may still survive in the development area. The principal sources of information were the chapel’s burial registers, held in the National Archives at Kew, but available on film at the Chester Archives and Local Studies, though information was also obtained from a range of published and unpublished sources, and this was compared with the results of archaeological evaluation trenching undertaken on Trinity Street in 2015 (ECH6203, R3877). Although the chapel itself opened in 1700, the assessment has determined that burial did not commence until 1792, initially within a graveyard on the west side of the chapel, adjacent to Trinity Street. In or around 1827, a second, smaller burial ground (the ‘new ground’) was established on the south side of the chapel, presumably because the original cemetery (the ‘old ground’) was reaching capacity. However, the registers prove that burials continued to be made in the ‘old ground’ to the end of the lifetime of the cemetery. The graveyard was finally closed for burial in 1855, the latest interment recorded in the registers having occurred in September 1854. The assessment found evidence that at least 119 burials had been made within the Trinity Street cemetery in the 63 years of its existence, though evidence was also found to suggest that some of these burials were omitted from the registers. However, this is thought to have been a rare occurrence. The number of burials located in each of the two burial grounds cannot be estimated with any precision, though a ratio of roughly 7:5, west:south (c 69:50) would seem to be broadly correct. Of the original total, it is thought probable that approximately half (c 60) were destroyed when the Forum shopping centre was built in the mid-1960s, which appears to have resulted in the total destruction of the southern cemetery and the removal of a strip along the east side of the western cemetery, together with the complete destruction of the chapel itself. Other groundworks, notably those associated with the construction of the eastern part of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, which oversails Trinity Street at this locale, and (potentially) the insertion of deep service runs beneath the modern road (which has shifted eastwards since the nineteenth century and now overlies the western edge of the ‘old ground’), will certainly have destroyed additional graves, though this is impossible to quantify accurately. However, it is possible that approximately 50 burials survive, in whole or in part, within the area of the Northgate site, together, in all probability, with an unquantifiable amount of disarticulated human bone. (1)