Focusing on Bristol and York, this paper will present a general outline of the treatment of urban burial grounds during the long eighteenth century. It will consider their upkeep and their use for purposes other than burial, before considering the responses of parish authorities to their increasing overcrowding, which took the form of extensions or the establishment of separate additional burial grounds. As part of this, it will look at the ways in which burial grounds were continually reshaped in accordance with the needs of the living, for example in the process of street-widening. It will also offer a pre-history of nineteenth century burial debates, assessing the attitudes of urban residents towards spaces of the dead and discussing the nature and extent of opposition to urban burial in the century and a half prior to its becoming a cause of widespread concern in the 1840s, and its outlawing over the course of the 1850s.