The Leicester General Cemetery Company was founded in 1845, and the cemetery itself opened in 1849. The mid-nineteenth century was producing dead Leicester residents faster than the city's parish churchyards could accommodate them, and the new commercial cemeteries were both a public health necessity and a Victorian moral project. J. R. Hamilton and J. M. Medland, who also designed cemeteries for Birmingham and Plymouth, laid out Welford Road with roughly equal areas of consecrated ground for Anglicans and unconsecrated ground for everyone else, a small architectural acknowledgment of religious dissent. The two chapels at the centre have since been demolished, as has a Gothic Revival lodge by the main entrance. What survives is a war memorial whose statue was designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, the architect who also gave Britain the Cross of Sacrifice that stands in Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries worldwide.

Leicester City Council publishes a leaflet identifying one hundred notable burials within the cemetery, and a careful afternoon's walk among them is a tour of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English life. William Green served as a soldier through the Napoleonic Wars and survived to be buried with his medals here. Ewart Astill played cricket for Leicestershire County Cricket Club for decades, an all-rounder good enough to tour with England. Bert Harris was a professional cyclist of the late Victorian era, when bicycle racing drew crowds the size of football matches. John Flower (1793-1861) painted Leicestershire's churches and country houses with a precise topographical eye. Arthur Wakerley designed the buildings around the city centre that still give Leicester its distinctive Edwardian character. Commemorative plaques throughout the cemetery tell their stories, biographies in a hundred words or fewer, a quietly democratic local history project.

Between 2002 and 2004 Leicester City Council carried out a stability assessment on around a thousand of the cemetery's memorials, and laid them flat. The procedure is known in the cemetery industry as topple-testing, and it follows a series of incidents elsewhere in Britain in which decaying gravestones fell on visitors. The intent was protective. The execution caused enormous distress, particularly among the descendants of 119 people of Polish origin whose family graves were among those laid down. Many of these were Poles who had come to Leicester after fighting alongside the British in the Second World War, and the sight of their parents' and grandparents' memorials flattened to the ground felt like a second loss. The council had not obtained a faculty, the formal church-court permission required to alter consecrated ground, before doing the work. They applied for one retrospectively. The Consistory Court rejected the application. On appeal to the Court of Arches in 2006, the faculty was granted, but only on the condition that the council work with the Friends of Welford Road Cemetery and the local Polish community to restore the toppled memorials. The work is ongoing decades later. A cemetery, it turns out, is not just stone and grass but a covenant between the living and the dead, and that covenant is not easily set aside.

Welford Road Cemetery is still an active burial ground, although most of its space is now occupied by people who died long before anyone alive can remember them. The Friends of Welford Road Cemetery run guided walks and research the unmarked graves. The Leicestershire and Rutland Family History Society publishes detailed indexes for genealogists tracing relatives back through nineteenth-century Leicester. The grounds, with their mature trees and stone monuments, are also a quiet green corner of an otherwise dense city. Joggers use the paths. Birds nest in the avenues. The whole place is a working demonstration that what cities most need from their dead is not separation but proximity, and that a Victorian commercial cemetery, founded as a practical solution to a public health problem, can become with time something closer to a museum, a park, and an ongoing conversation among generations.