St Andrew’s Cemetery in Jesmond is a remarkable mid-19th-century designed landscape: a Grade II registered historic park & garden with over 43,000 burials, two chapels, a lodge and porte-cochère, and a rich collection of memorials.

MAZi Architects, together with Hyem Landscape, developed an early-stage, community-led concept proposal to help align the cemetery’s ongoing role as an active place of burial with its growing civic value as a shared landscape of memory, ecology and care.

Our process began with questionnaires, surveys and an investigative workshop (Nov 2025) and stakeholder conversations bringing together the Jesmond Community Orchard, West Jesmond Primary School, Percy Hedley School, City Guides and local groups, mapping how the site already supports learning, volunteering, recreation and heritage routes.

The proposal frames a set of practical, phased opportunities - improving accessibility and wayfinding, adding places to pause, and strengthening biodiversity and sensory planting - while exploring light-touch interventions for the orchard, learning gardens, gate building and the chapels. A key ambition is to treat the cemetery as living civic infrastructure: a place where stewardship, outdoor education, habitat repair and cultural storytelling can sit respectfully alongside remembrance.