In the ear­ly 1850s, fol­low­ing the death of his father, Charles Dick­ens suf­fered from insom­nia. At night he wan­dered rest­less­ly through what had become the largest city on the plan­et. On one of these ‘homeless night walks’ through a Lon­don ceme­tery, he imag­ined the city pop­u­lat­ed by its past res­i­dents:

‘It was a solemn con­sid­er­a­tion what enor­mous hosts of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised while the liv­ing slept, there would not be the space of a pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the liv­ing to come out into. Not only that, but the vast armies of dead would over­flow the hills and val­leys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, God knows how far.’

Few cities can boast a rail­way line for the dead. The Lon­don Necrop­o­lis Rail­way sta­tion was con­struct­ed by the Lon­don Necrop­o­lis & Nation­al Mau­soleum Com­pa­ny, specif­i­cal­ly to serve their Brook­wood Ceme­tery, 25 miles away in Wok­ing, Sur­rey. The Company’s logo was, some­what ghoul­ish­ly, a skull and cross­bones.

The sta­tion opened on 13 Novem­ber 1854, just out­side Lon­don’s Water­loo sta­tion on the Lon­don and South West­ern Rail­way. Trains took coffins and mourn­ers from the ‘Necropolis sta­tion’ — locat­ed between York Street (now Leake Street) and West­min­ster Bridge Road — direct­ly to plat­forms with­in the ceme­tery. By 1874, 64,000 peo­ple had made the jour­ney from the Necrop­o­lis sta­tion and been buried at Brook­wood.

In class-con­scious Britain, even funer­al trains were divid­ed accord­ing to class, and this applied to both the liv­ing and the dead pas­sen­gers – although of course these only need­ed a one-way tick­et. Indeed, the trains had car­riages reserved for dif­fer­ent class­es (First, Sec­ond and Third) as well as for Angli­cans or Non­con­formists. At Brook­wood there were even two sta­tions, one for Angli­cans and the oth­er for Non­con­formists. Each sta­tion was also pro­vid­ed with its own licensed bar. The divi­sions in Vic­to­ri­an soci­ety last­ed up to the very edge of the grave.

When the free-thinker Charles Brad­laugh died in 1891, 5,000 mourn­ers took the train down to Brook­wood. No one was dressed in black. The 150 or so mourn­ers who attend­ed the cre­ma­tion of Friedrich Engels on 10 August 1895 at Wok­ing Cre­ma­to­ri­um also trav­elled from the Necrop­o­lis sta­tion. His ash­es were lat­er scat­tered from the cliffs at Beachy Head in Sus­sex.

Pri­or to 1900 there was a dai­ly funer­al express, down to Brook­wood and back. To make way for an expan­sion of the main­line sta­tion, a new Necrop­o­lis sta­tion, designed by Cyril Bazett Tubbs, was built at 121 West­min­ster Bridge Road from 1900 to 1902. By the mid-1930s, trains were only run­ning twice each week, much of their busi­ness hav­ing moved onto the roads.

On 16 April 1941 the sta­tion was hit by bombs dur­ing an air raid, dam­ag­ing the lines. It was nev­er rebuilt or re-opened. How­ev­er, the entrance to the sta­tion used by First Class tick­et hold­ers – both the quick and the dead – still stands in West­min­ster Bridge Road, a per­ma­nent reminder of a very dif­fer­ent Lon­don. I pho­tographed it last year. The sta­tion and ceme­tery is the sub­ject of Andrew Martin’s nov­el The Necrop­o­lis Rail­way (2003).

Sources:

Charles Dick­ens, ‘Night Walks’ (1860), cit­ed from Dick­ens, On Lon­don (Lon­don: Hes­pe­rus, 2010), 77;
Ben Wein­reb, The Lon­don Ency­clopae­dia (1983; repr. Lon­don: Macmil­lan, 2008), 992;
Ed Glin­ert, London’s Dead (2008), 215;
John M. Clarke, ‘The Lon­don Necrop­o­lis Rail­way’, Cab­i­net, 20 (Win­ter 2005/06);
Wikipedia