Built by the Sheffield General Cemetery Company in response to the perceived severe unsanitary problems of burial within city churchyards. The company raised capital of £25,000 and commissioned architect Samuel Worth to design the grounds purchased - a steeply sloping hillside to the south bank of the River Porter. The cemetery includes a number of Egyptianate and otherwise classically styled buildings designed around a processional route. This route began on Cemetery Road (where two obelisks once stood either side of Cemetery Avenue), and led through its elegant trees to the 'Lion' Gateway. This gateway forms a bridge across the River Porter (an important symbolic reference to the crossing of the River Styx in Roman burial rites). The route then curves up the hillside, across two tiers of curving catacombs, before continuing and indirect route onwards, both to provide a steadier incline for horse drawn carriages and also to provide a view of the nearby designed landscapes of the contemporary Botanical Gardens and King Edwards School across the valley. The cemetery includes fully mature tree planting, carefully placed to enhance landscape views. The climax of the cemetery is the 'Nonconformist Chapel' in Greek Doric temple style with Egyptianate windows. Above the cemetery along Cemetery Road are offices in similar style and an Egyptianate gateway. The nonconformist section is partitioned from the later (1848) Church of England extension to the east by a low wall. This section of the cemetery retains most of its monumental sculpture which (although in a state of much neglect and frequent vandalism and theft includes hugely significant memorials to many important 19th century Sheffield figures including soldiers of the Crimean, First and Second World Wars, Mark Firth (steel), John Cole (Dept. Stores), George Bassett (Confectioner) and Samuel Holberry (Chartist 'martyr'). This section of the cemetery is overgrown and reverting to nature but remains a very significantly legible historic landscape. Fairbank's 1795 map shows the area now utilised as the cemetery as enclosed land with typical sinuous boundaries of an enclosed former open field (although the steepness of much of the slope may indicate some ancient woodland. Information from SCC 1997 (based on Sewell 1996).