| The Ardwick Cemetery The Ardwick Cemetery used to
occupy a site near Hyde Road and Devonshire Street behind the Nicholls
Hospital building (marked A in the image below) that today is the
Nicholls Campus of City College.
 The cemetery opened in 1838 and
can be seen in the map segment below, dated 1844. As you can see,
at that time it was a simple rectangular shape.
 By 1953, the date of the aerial image below, the cemetery had expanded eastwards.  The cemetery operated until
1950 by which time some 80,000 people had been buried within its
grounds. Among the famous people interred there was the scientist
John Dalton. Such was his reputation that after his death his
body laid in state
in Manchester Town Hall and apparently 40,000 people filed past.
It is said that on the day of the funeral 100 coaches followed the
funeral cortege to Ardwick Cemetery. The statue of John Dalton,
that once stood in Piccadilly, is now located outside the John Dalton
Building of Manchester Metropolitan Museum. Beside the statue,
just visible on the right of this photograph, is the granite top of
Dalton's tomb at Ardwick.
 In the 1960s the site was
converted into sports fields called Nicholls Field. A sign at the
site, commemorating the opening on June 16, 1966, lists the prominent
people buried in the cemetery.
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