With space for graves in short supply, especially in urban areas, an answer can be to have a mausoleum built so the deceased can be interred above ground. Steve Richardson of Memorial Service Ltd has found a market for his mausolea in London, as he explains here.

Steve Richardson, the owner of memorial wholesaler Memorial Service Ltd in Benfleet, Essex, has always looked for opportunities where others have sometimes seen threats.

Steve is a traditionally trained stonemason who set up his wholesale business in Essex in 1993. He saw the potential of supplying funeral directors early on and has never shied away from dealing directly with private cemeteries. It has not always made him popular with the memorial masonry trade but he could never see the point of fighting change. If someone new wanted stone he was happy to supply it.

He has also always been happy to try to design solutions to problems. With society becoming more secular, 18 years ago he came up with the idea of producing bird baths and garden seats containing cavities for ashes. He calls it the Home & Garden range. It was a bit ahead of its time and it is only in the past five years that it has started to grow in popularity, particularly among people planning their own funeral, who like the idea of a garden ornament they can enjoy before their ashes end up in it.

It was the same approach to problem solving that led him into mausolea (or mausoleums if you prefer the Anglicised version), columbaria and vaults.

It was in 1998 that he designed his first one that was installed the following year. A bereaved customer wanted her father to be buried in the family plot, but the plot was full. Steve was asked by the cemetery if he could make a mausoleum and he came up with a design for it that satisfied the customer, the cemetery and the planners.

“I was excited by the prospect of making a mausoleum,” he says. “It was something different.”

These days, making mausolea is not so unusual for Steve’s Memorial Service company and in the cemeteries where the company works areas have been set aside for them.

Dignity-owned Streatham Park Cemetery (pictured above) is where Memorial Service erected its first mausoleum. There are now many made by the company to be seen there and more are still being built by Memorial Service. They are made of 100mm thick granite walls that sit on 150mm high granite plinths. The latest one (pictured on the next page during construction) contains 28 tonnes of granite. One nearby contains 48 tonnes of granite and a communal mausoleum with space for 48 bodies used 88tonnes of granite.

Steve admits: “The industry did get the hump with me when I started selling to funeral directors and cemeteries but it didn’t give me much choice. When I started I went to memorial masons as a wholesaler. They wanted the stones but they didn’t want to pay me. I had to secure my business.”

To date he has only supplied private cemeteries but, like all other wholesalers, is keeping an eye on developments among local authorities to see if more of them start selling memorials to the public.

As well as wholesaling memorials, Steve also runs a retail memorial masonry business called Tudor Rose, selling the memorials he imports, makes and inscribes at his factory in Benfleet, where he has a lettercutter and carver working for him to produce bespoke memorials. For a while he also ran a funeral director business, T W Boorman in Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge in Kent, but sold them to Greenfields when the recession started to bite. “It was a bit of an exciting avenue to go down but there is a lot of competition. The big groups are taking over, so I decided to stick with what I know best.”

He added another string to his bow when he bought the factory next door to his to make polished concrete bases for the memorials he sells because he wanted to be sure of the quality of the concrete and the polish. He has also diversified into concrete paving slabs.

Because Memorial Service is a relatively large business for the sector, it needs to sell memorials every week. “In my heyday I was selling 110 a week. I’m proud of that because I started from scratch,” says Steve.

These days the company sells about 70 memorials a week, including the mausolea but more usually headstones and kerb sets from the catalogue it has just spent £48,000 up-dating. Steve has always been proud of his catalogue, the latest version of which once again runs to 58 pages. It includes the mausolea and an extended Home & Garden range.

To deliver the memorials, Steve has just bought two new 13.5tonne lorries with cranes that can lift a tonne over three rows of memorials.

Memorial Service customers include three private cemeteries, around 50 funeral directors and a few retail memorial masons, including Tudor Rose, of course.

Because Memorial Service has aimed at the higher end of the market, adding value by hand lettering and carving larger memorials than the standard ogee headstone, the recession was uncomfortable, Steve admits. It was easy for customers to trade down and they did. However, he says sales have been picking up again this year.

He is satisfied that he stuck to his guns.

“I have never done anything cheap,” he says. “I have never undercut the market. I am not afraid of taking advice. I ask my customers what their price point is and am guided by that. I know the market inside out on the memorial side and you can make a memorial to any price, but one of my pet hates is someone selling memorials for nothing. There’s no need for it. People like to pay for a memorial. They are proud of how much they have paid for it.”