The Muslim Garden of Peace in Hainault, Essex, has won the Premier Award in the Stoneguard Phoenix cemetery design competition run by the Association of Burial Authorities.

The architects who designed the Peace Garden, from Austin-Smith:Lord of Warrington, Cheshire, were presented with the Award of £1,000, an engraved plaque and a certificate during the Association of Burial Authorities\' Grounds for Burial Conference at Brompton Cemetery Chapel in April.

The Cemetery Trust say their vision with the garden was to create an "English Islamic experience".

The newly revived Phoenix competition, now intended once again to become an annual event, seeks to encourage a renaissance in funerary art and memorial landscapes.

It has always been a feature of the competition that sites do not have to be real - it is a competition for concepts to break away from the serried ranks of flat slab headstones that generally mark modern cemeteries.

However, three of the award winners this year were actual projects, including the Garden of Peace that was opened on 8 November last year.

Another of the \'real\' projects is the memorial garden to the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Belfast, which is to be officially opened this summer. It won the Groundforce Award for best communal monument. The architect is Peter Hutchinson from Belfast.

The ToppleTester Site Safe Award went to Harrogate Borough Council, North Yorkshire, for the development of a monolith \'shoe\' system.

Two other winning designs chose actual sites for their concept schemes, although the schemes themselves are not real projects.

Mae Architects, with offices in London\'s Clerkenwell and Tower Hamlets, chose a site in Vallance Road in Tower Hamlets for their futuristic, above ground burial concept for an inner city cemetery. This earned them the Olympia Metal Spinners second prize in the Premier Award category.

And landscape architect Claire Greener from Kentish Town, NW5, based her concept design on a cemetery and adjacent site in Belfast. It developed a natural green park recreation space and willow coppicing farm. It gained the Teleshore Green Burial Site Award.

A Highly Commended Certificate went to a design submitted by Akos Juhasz, an architecture student at the University of Bath. His spiral pattern memorial park idea was third in the total concept category.

The panel of assessors, who made their selection from drawings and written reports, comprises representatives of the public as well as death care industry professionals, architects and designers.