St Peter's Church and Mary Shelley's Grave

Bournemouth's Victorian parish church, with Mary Shelley's tomb in the churchyard

The 19th-century parish church of St Peter, with its slim 200-foot spire, was for years the tallest building in Bournemouth and is still the most prominent landmark in the town centre. The interior is unusually richly decorated for a Victorian parish church: a painted chancel ceiling by G.F. Bodley, stained glass by Burne-Jones and Morris, and a 14th-century alabaster panel above the high altar.

In the churchyard outside is the grave of Mary Shelley, marked by a chest tomb in the south-east corner. Shelley's son lived at Boscombe Manor and built the church partly in her memory. A plaque inside the church gives the family history. The church is usually open during the day.

things to do sight architecture
A story
Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein at the age of eighteen, asked to be buried with her parents in St Pancras, London. When she died in 1851 her son Sir Percy Florence Shelley moved the family graves to Bournemouth so that all could rest together. Buried with her are the disinterred remains of her parents -- Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin -- and the heart of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, which had been rescued from his funeral pyre on a beach near Viareggio in 1822 and kept in a jar by Mary.