A list of those buried at Arnos Vale is a who's who of Victorian Bristol.  The Cemetery accommodated both Anglicans and Nonconformists from the wealthiest and most dominant families to paupers who died in the city's immense parish workhouses.

Here you will find the graves of powerful industrial families such as the Wills tobacco dynasty or the Robinsons, founders of the packaging firm, or Charles Wathen, a founder of the Gardiner Wathen clothing company still trading today, alongside those of social reformers and campaigners.

The cemetery's most famous reformer is probably Mary Carpenter, who campaigned for education for poor children and who famously ran a reformatory school for girls at the Red Lodge on Park Row.  You'll also find the surprisingly modest tomb of George Muller, the German-born evangelist whose famous orphanages did so much to tackle the terrible scandal of children abandoned to Bristol's streets and workhouses.

The one person of truly international historic stature buried at Arnos Vale is the social and religious reformer and philosopher Rajah Rammohun Roy who died in Bristol in 1833.  His elaborate Indian-style tomb is one of the most distinctive at Arnos Vale.

Several hundred service personnel from both World Wars were buried or cremated after dying in local naval and military hospitals of wounds sustained on active service, or succumbing to disease (particularly meningitis and pneumonia) or training injuries.  The war dead are not just British - they came from all over the world, including Canada, Australia, Norway, India and elsewhere.  There are even two black South Africans.

The cemetery also contains military and naval heroes who died of natural causes long after their war service was over. These include three holders of the Victorian Cross (two of them from the First World War, and one from the Crimean War), several veterans of Waterloo (1815) and at least one man who served at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805).