WABF awarded £93k for Brookwood Cemetery project

The Woking Asian Business Forum has been awarded £93,400 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for a two-year project aimed at exploring and documenting minority burial grounds in Brookwood Cemetery.

Alongside Brookwood Cemetery, the Surrey History Centre, the Brookwood Cemetery Society and The Lightbox, the WABF-led project will collect information concerning the history and rituals relating to the burial grounds.

The project will be managed by Woking-based social researcher Ole Jensen, working with local stakeholders and volunteers.

Findings from the project will be made widely available once the project ends and will also be available on the ‘Exploring Surrey’s Past’ website, which is managed by the Surrey History Centre.

An app will also be developed, enabling visitors to Brookwood Cemetery to access information about the minority burial ground. Additional outputs will include a documentary, an exhibition at The Lightbox, and thematic walks in Brookwood Cemetery, in collaboration with Brookwood Cemetery Society.

As the largest cemetery in the UK, Brookwood Cemetery is also host to the highest concentration of minority burial grounds in the country. Apart from a wide range of Muslim burial grounds, these include the first Zoroastrian burial ground established in Europe, as well as Swedish, Latvian and Serbian grounds, to name but a few.

According to the cemetery’s conservators, these burial grounds constitute an important part of Brookwood Cemetery, and they represent “a unique cultural heritage that has so far remained undocumented”.

Shahid Azeem, chairman of the WABF, said: “We are very excited that the National Lottery Heritage Fund has decided to support this important project. Moreover, the project is very timely, as it supplements the ambitious plans for Brookwood Cemetery that Woking Borough Council has put forward recently.”