For decades, it has been a place for families to mourn their dead. Now grieving relatives say they have nowhere to pay their respects after council bosses cleared a memorial site at one of the city’s busiest crematoriums.

Shocked relatives are “disgusted” at Glasgow City Council’s decision to remove items including memorial stones and benches from an area of Linn Crematorium which had become an unofficial site of remembrance over decades.

Items of commemoration and remembrance have been cleared to a Portakabin and laid out for collection, with families being directed to pay to lease alternative temporary memorials.

Carla Arnott is among those to have been “devastated” by the change, which saw her family’s memorial items, including stones and angels, removed from the site. 

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And she said the council strategy at Linn was “making money from the dead.”

Ms Arnott regularly visits the crematorium to remember her late father Tam Arnott and grandparents Helen and Willie McKenna, as well as twins her mother lost during pregnancy.

Her family have laid several items, including engraved memorial stones, at an area where unofficial memorials have been placed for decades. 

Ms Arnott visits the site regularly with her daughter.

She said her family now have nowhere to grieve their dead, whose ashes have been scattered in the memorial garden at the site on the southside of Glasgow.

She said: “Respect for the dead has been forgotten here. I feel sick that there’s nowhere for me to go and spend time with them now.

“It feels like they are making money out of the dead, and families who have lost loved ones. These memorials mean a lot to people in this situation.

The area was an unofficial memorial gardenThe area was an unofficial memorial garden (Image: Handout)

“When I phoned the council I was told to put our memorial stone in the garden. I live in a flat. They told me we could get a temporary stone for a few years, or a plaque. They both cost hundreds of pounds.”

The crematorium, which opened in 1962, is currently closed for a three month renovation. Paid-for official memorial options include a temporary commemorative leaf costing £119 and a memorial planter, costing £490.

Ms Arnott, 29, from Pollokshaws, said she has spoken to other families who’ve had their items removed, including some who have been using the unofficial space to mark the lives of their loved ones for over 30 years. She has launched a petition over the removal of the items. She

The financial services worker has now launched a petition urging the council to allow families the right to honour their loved ones free of charge.

She said: “When I went up to look for our stone, I had to go to a Portakabin and they were all laid outside in two big lines with hundreds of items, and we had to go and look for them.

“These stones have been here for years. The council are saying they’re unauthorised, but it was a member of staff at the crematorium who told us 20 years ago that we could lay a stone where we did for my grandad and dad. 

“Other people had been doing the same for longer than that, and that’s been the way at the crematorium for a long time.

“There’s nowhere for people to put the stones and benches they’ve already paid for, and it feels like we have nowhere to go now to express our grief. It’s appalling. It makes me sick that someone is paid to sit in an office and make a decision like this that causes people such upset.”

A Glasgow City Council spokesman said the authority’s stance on unauthorised items has been in place for years, but confirmed that the recent clearance has affected more items than previously.

The spokesman added: “Our rules state that unauthorised memorials are not permitted to be placed by the crematorium, but they do appear and we try to address this issue as sensitively as possible.

“Linn Crematorium is currently being renovated and to allow this work to go ahead it has been necessary to remove the memorials.

“As the memorials are unauthorised we have no records of who they belong to and so communicating with the owners can be difficult.

“Signage has been put in place to advise owners the memorials have been moved to the adjacent Linn Cemetery, where they can be collected over the next year.”