Purpose

At the Public Health and Communities Policy
Committee meeting of 11 October 2024, the South Bristol Cemetery
Expansion Project was approved to provide up to 870 additional
standard coffin burial plots plus provision for other
memorialisation in an area of land to the south of the existing
cemetery, known as Area 1. This approach avoided expanding the
cemetery into the adjacent Colliters Brook SNCI area (Site of
Nature Conservation Interest) which has been the subject of a
public challenge focussed on avoiding harm to the ecological value
of the SNCI.
Achieving the additional burial capacity requires new drainage
infrastructure, to include laying a drainage carrier pipe and
constructing a storm water attenuation pond. As these were proposed
to be located within the SNCI, the Committee included a requirement
for officers to: ‘prioritise investigating alternative
drainage solutions that do not rely on systems running through the
SNCI’ and to ‘consider all mitigation options, and no
final decisions regarding drainage infrastructure will be made
without thorough assessment of the environmental impact and the
feasibility of alternatives.’
The alternative options were assessed against the ’Baseline
Option’ which was defined as: The original drainage design
which received planning consent in April 2024, as refined during
detailed engineering design and reduced in size to reflect the
PH

Content

After thorough consideration of the options
presented in the investigation, the Executive Director Growth and
Regeneration accepted the recommendation that the Baseline Option
was the ‘preferred option’. This decision was made in
consultation with the Chair of the Public Health and Communities
Policy Committee.