Officers are ‘stuck between a rock and a hard place’ when it comes to Spalding Cemetery which is coming close to being full.
Coun Elizabeth Sneath, South Holland District Council’s portfolio for conservation and heritage said that was the case as there was ‘no easy option’ of where to bury the town’s dead in future years.
At the most recent meeting of he Coun she was asked about whether Chiltern Drive Playing Field was still being considered.
It’s next to the current cemetery and an application for it be made part of the cemetery was turned down by the district council’s Planning Committee back in 2015 after huge numbers of objections, including one from Sport England.
At the time the SHDC said the current cemetery only had four years worth of space.
Ten years later it faces the same issue and, as reported in the summer, Chiltern Drive.
“There’s been no definite decision,” Coun Sneath told the most recent council. “We’re going to have a very hard look in the existing cemetery and try and find some more spaces.
“We’re looking at ideas we haven’t considered before because we’ve very few spaces left.
“We’ve probably only got a short space of time in the grand scheme of things.
“If we were looking at an extension we’d be looking at other places of Spalding anyway.
“We’d be trying to find new land as much as finding a place near to the cemetery.”
Speaking after the meeting Coun Sneath said that it might be one of the first things a new Spalding town council has to look at due to local government reorganisation.
Other cemeteries in South Holland are overseen by parish or town councils, but as Spalding doesn’t have one, its cemetery falls to the district council
“There is no easy option,” Coun Sneath said. “We’re going to have a really intensive look at all the records to find places in the current cemetery that don’t currently have people in, but it’s going to be really difficult.
“Pinchbeck is about to open its new cemetery and I know how costly a process it is.
“We’re going to see if there’s other green land but most of it is brownfield and allocated for housing.”
“With the local government reform coming it might be something for a future town council.”
