Necropolis Railway

121 Westminster Bridge Road, SEI

- BY JOHN DARLINGTON

Today, an optimistic traveller might take 43 minutes to travel direct from Brookwood Station in Surrey to London Waterloo. It's a well-worn commuter route and so, after a weary day in the city, returning workers might be forgiven for declaring themselves "dead tired" as they walk along Waterloo Bridge Road towards the grand old station. But for some in the past it was a far, far longer journey, and only ever one way - because this was once the departure point for one of the strangest rail services in British history. A train not for the living, but the dead.

By the mid-1800s, London was quite literally running out of room to die. The burgeoning Victorian city was bursting at its seams. Typhus, cholera and scarlet fever epidemics meant that burial places were under great strain, even with the addition of the new so-called "Magnificent Seven" cemeteries such as Abney Park and Brompton, which both opened in 1840. Church graveyards and vaults were so full that one bishop refused to consecrate any more ground in the city, citing "unspeakable effluvia". Something had to be done.

Coffins, class and carriages

The answer? Build an enormous new cemetery on cheaper, unpopulated land out of town. So, in 1852 the London Necropolis Society purchased more than 2,000 acres of wooded Surrey heath at Brookwood, immediately landscaping up to 500 acres to create The London Necropolis, then the largest cemetery in the world.