London

The solution eventually came with another great Victorian development: the railway. Investors put forward a scheme to open the Brookwood Necropolis at Woking. At over 2,000 acres, this would be a ‘City of the Dead’, a desolate heath transformed into a great garden of sleep.

It’s hard to imagine now, but in the 1840s today’s commuter belt was open country. Away from the city, but easily reached by train, the Necropolis would be on a cheap, greenfield site, with plenty of room for expansion. Catering for every sect, it would provide burial space for all London’s parishes, ‘in this and future generations’.

The scheme was not without problems: the construction company was riven with scandals, and residents on Westminster Bridge Road complained about the prospect of living next to a station for the dead. Nevertheless, the London Necropolis opened on November 13 1854.
It was an ambitious project. George Stephenson had only launched the first passenger service in 1830. The first through-train from Waterloo to Southampton ran in 1838, six years before the London Necropolis Company opened its private station at Waterloo. And there was much doubt as to whether the noise and clamour of a railway station was appropriate to Christian burial.

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Trains ran straight into the cemetery grounds. There were two stations, each for different parts of the cemetery – North for Dissenters and South for Anglicans – adjacent to the corresponding chapels. The South Station was licensed, and operated as a pub, which helped reconcile the locals to the giant cemetery on their doorstep. The train service operated until 1941, when the station at Waterloo was bombed. It was never rebuilt, but the cemetery, which has expanded to contain the dead of two world wars, flourishes to this day.

With the development of cremation at the turn of the twentieth century, London has come almost full circle in its reaction to death. (The UK has the sixth-highest cremation rate in the world.) Like our pagan ancestors, we inter the ashes of our dead outside the city. There is one other development: a concern with the polluting effects of cremation and casket burial has led to a trend for woodland burial using modest cardboard coffins.

At one stage, during the 1970s, London’s cemeteries faced the terrible prospect of being sold off to property developers. That this threat never materialised is in part thanks to the dedicated bands of volunteers who have preserved the cemeteries for the future.

The redoubtable Jean Pateman, chair of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, has raised over £6 million; other groups of cemetery Friends have followed suit. In a city as old as London, this seems fitting. From the Neolithic tumulus on Hampstead Heath to the neoclassicism of Kensal Green, the dead are always with us.

‘Necropolis: London and its Dead’ by Catharine Arnold is available from all good bookshops, priced £14.99. For further reading, see ‘The Necropolis Railway’ by Andrew Martin (Faber) and ‘London’s Necropolis: A Guide to Brookwood Cemetery’ by John M Clarke (Sutton).