Box Cemetery from the Air              All photos Leigh Lewis   Text Julian Orbach    June 2024
Box Cemetery was not mentioned in the 1963 or 1975 editions of “The Buildings of England. Wiltshire by Nikolaus Pevsner”. However, it is referenced in the 2021 edition edited by Julian Orbach: “CEMETERY, Bath Road, 1858 by Poulton & Woodman of Reading. Lodge and chapel in frilly Gothic, the chapel with a needle spire.” The author of the revised edition, Julian Orbach, kindly sent Varian Tye the following additional details to supplement this entry. All the amazing photographs were kindly sent by Leigh Lewis.
 
Inventive Victorian Gothic lodge and chapel in crazed rubble banded with ashlar. The chapel has a needle spire and little angel corbels in the windows. Ashlar interior with a florid stone lectern.
The cemetery at Box is very special, for its completeness, its still, rural setting, the quality of the architecture and the special way in which the local Box stone is used, in what I would regard as a virtuoso way, emphasising the differed qualities of rubble, ashlar and carved stone, which is entirely appropriate, Box being by then pre-eminently a stone-mining village. The cemetery group, chapel, lodge, gates and walls, display the Box stone to advantage, beautifully detailed, with carved detail, ashlar and rubble stone, laid to decorative effect. The roofs are of stone tiles. The stone structures and iron gates survive remarkably intact.
The cemetery is conceived as an integrated landscape, with the chapel set towards the back, but not central, approached by a drive from the lodge that curves to give an oblique approach to the chapel. Planting is largely of evergreens, including yew, cypress and Scots pine, individual trees scattered for effect through the rectangular original cemetery, and with a shelter belt along the western edge.
Unusually for a village, there was a competition, won by Poulton & Woodman Architects, Reading. They were brothers-in-law who designed much for Congregational church; William Ford Poulton  was grandson of Charles Poulton who built the first Reading Town Hall in 1786, He designed the huge Westminster Congregational chapel, London, in 1865, was the father of Professor Sir Edward Bagnall Poulton, professor of Zoology at Oxford, who married a daughter of George Palmer MP the Reading biscuit tycoon.
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While I was revising the Buildings of England volume for Wiltshire the cemetery at Box stood out as unusually elaborate for a village cemetery, and exceptionally well preserved.