The Manchester Tesco built on an old graveyard where 20,000 people were buried

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

It sounds like the ominous revelation from a horror movie, and for many families it was. Back in the early 2000s, the decision was made to build a brand new shopping complex on the site of an old burial ground.

Wesleyan Cemetery in Cheetham hill opened in 1815, initially as the burial place for wealthy merchants in north Manchester. The graveyard had been the resting place for over 20,000 people before it closed to new burials in 1968.

After the graveyard closed it became neglected and overgrown, and was passed into the council's hands in 1973. On the Interment history website, Les Leggett, shared his memories of the cemetery having grown up in a house near to the cemetery gates. READ MORE: Ancoats' new affordable flats are in one of its oldest buildings - we took a look inside Join our WhatsApp Top Stories and, Breaking News group by clicking this link He wrote: "In one area of the cemetery there was a mixture of huge fancy memorial stones at the graves of the wealthy, in another there were rows of five foot high stones which were so close together they seemed to form roofless tunnels, and in another area the headstones had been laid flat over the graves after the burials." Proposals to regenerate this area of Cheetham Hill had been in the pipeline since the mid 1990s.

In the early 2000s, the land was sold to developers as part of a £20 million redevelopment of Cheetham Hill shopping centre. Try MEN Premium for FREE by clicking here for no ads, fun puzzles and brilliant new features. It was proposed around 2,000 graves in the old cemetery would be dug up and the bodies re-interred at Bury cemetery, six miles away.