The Park Street cemetery was ceremonially declared open in 1767. It is one of the first non-church cemeteries in the world. In the 19th century, it was known as the ‘Great Christian Burial ground’ in Asia. The cemetery was named after “Park Street” after the private deer park built by Sir Elijah Impey around Vansittart’s garden house. The cemetery served as a burial ground for the European expatriates who were settled in Calcutta during the colonial period. The cemetery houses the graves of many notable European figures of the regal era. Most distinguished tombs are those of ‘Rose Aymler’, beloved of the poet Walter Savage Langdor, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, the initiator of the Young Bengal Movement who lived an eventful life for a short period of just 22 years; Charles Dickens’ son, Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta in 1796, David Drummond, C. F. Andrews and Michael Madhusudan Dutta, the illustrious and anglicized poet of Bengal.The cemetery was closed in 1840 due to lack of burial space and is now a heritage site, preserved by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). In the year 1785, the burial ground was extended on the northern edge of Park Street and by 1840 an enormous new cemetery was opened in a place called the Lower Circular Road Cemetery located nearby.