Wilbury Hills
- Location: Letchworth Garden City, North Hertfordshire
- Client: North Hertfordshire District Council
- Date: 2005 – 07
- Value: £900,000
- Awards: Green Apple Award for Environmental Best Practice - 2007 Phoenix Premier Award - 2007 Brick Awards - Finalist 2007 RIBA ACE Awards - Finalist 2007
Wilbury Hills is a chapel, mausoleum and 8 hectare cemetery at the edge of Letchworth Garden City offering local amenity space as well as burial provision. “If there’s a model 21st-century cemetery, this is it.” (Steve Rose, The Guardian, 10th Dec 2007).
The site was designed to accommodate traditional burial as well as eco-burials, ashes plots, child graves, family plots and niche internments.
The cemetery takes its landscaping cues from field patterns to form a variety of spaces, some forested, some meadows, some lawns and one civic hard landscaped area adjacent to the chapel.
The chapel has a generous sheltered porch where burial parties gather. This leads to a top lit lobby and into the main hall, which offers a framed view of the landscape.
The shift in geometry reflects the way in which local agricultural barns are grouped together. A colonnaded mausoleum forms an enclosed courtyard. Materials are blue grey brick, larch and zinc.
