Wardsend Cemetery is a Victorian cemetery in the Owlerton district of Sheffield, England, consecrated by the Archbishop of York in 1859 and closed to legal burial in 1968.^[1]

The ground on which the cemetery stands was originally purchased by John Livesey in 1857, the Vicar of the nearby St. Philip's Church as an overspill burial ground.^[2]

The first burial at Wardsend was of a 2-year-old girl named Ann Marie Marsden in 1857. She is, in keeping with tradition, the "Guardian of the Cemetery".^{[clarification needed]}

The graveyard is also noteworthy for being the final resting place of George Lambert VC, a highly decorated Irish soldier,^[3] for holding graves of many victims of the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864, and being the only cemetery in Britain with an active railway line passing through it.

Sheffield Archives offers much material on the history of the cemetery, perhaps most significantly a detailed narrative account of the 1862 riot and subsequent court hearings entitled Extraordinary Doings in a Cemetery in Sheffield by Ivor Haythorne,^[4] and a 2013 dissertation project (heavily influenced by the history from below movement spearheaded by E.P. Thompson and George Rudé) called Crisis of Confidence: The Public Response to the 1862 Sheffield Resurrection Scandal by Jordan Lee Smith.^[2]

The cemetery was originally linked at its Hillsborough entrance by Wardsend Bridge, a two-arched stone structure built in the 18th century exclusively to provide access to the burial ground.^[7] However, after its destruction by the Sheffield floods on 25 June 2007^[8] it was rebuilt as a 31.2-foot (9.5 m) wide single-span integral bridge at an estimated cost of £673,000 and re-opened in early 2009.^{[9] [2]}

The cemetery also contains an obelisk dedicated to soldiers who died at Sheffield's Hillsborough Barracks, just down the road from the cemetery.^[10]

There are also buried here a number of service personnel who died in the First and Second World Wars but because their graves are now unmaintainable by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission their names are listed on a Screen Wall Memorial in Plot H of nearby City Road Cemetery.^[11]

Since its loss of status as a legal burial ground Sheffield City Council have done little to maintain the cemetery and it has fallen into neglect, save for the efforts of a conservation group the Friends of Wardsend Cemetery, who along with offering guided walks of the site, aim to cull the Japanese knotweed that has overgrown the area.^[12]