London Necropolis railway station was the terminus at Waterloo, London, of the London Necropolis Railway. The London Necropolis was opened in 1854 in response to severe overcrowding in London's existing graveyards and cemeteries. It aimed to use the recently developed technology of the railway to move as many burials as possible to the newly built Brookwood Cemetery in Brookwood, Surrey. This location was within easy travelling distance of London, but distant enough for the dead not to pose any risk to public hygiene. There were two locations for the station; the first was in operation from 1854 to 1902, the second from 1902 to 1941.
Although it had its own branch line into Brookwood Cemetery, most of the route of the London Necropolis Railway ran on the existing London and South Western Railway (LSWR). Consequently, a site was selected in Waterloo, near the LSWR's recently opened London terminus at Waterloo Bridge station (now London Waterloo). The building was specifically designed for the use of mourners. It had many private waiting rooms, which could also be used to hold funeral services, and a hydraulic lift to raise coffins to platform level. Existing railway arches were used for the storage of bodies.
In 1899 the location of the terminus was blocking the expansion of Waterloo station. After much negotiation, the LSWR reached agreement with the London Necropolis Company, the owners of the cemetery and the railway: in return for the existing site, the LSWR re-equipped the London Necropolis Railway and supplied it with a new station on Westminster Bridge Road. This new building was designed to contrast with other funeral directors' premises by being as attractive as possible. In 1902 the railway moved into the new building, and the earlier station was demolished.
On 16 April 1941, during World War II the station was heavily damaged in an air raid. Much of the building was destroyed and the tracks to the station were rendered unusable. Although some funeral trains continued to run from nearby Waterloo station, the London terminus was never used again. Following the end of the war the London Necropolis Company decided that reopening the London Necropolis Railway was not financially worthwhile, and the surviving railway adjacent company office building at 121 Westminster Bridge Road was sold. This remnant remains intact, and relatively unaltered.
Background In the first half of the 19th century the population of London more than doubled, from a little under a million people in 1801 to almost two and a half million in 1851. The city's dead had been buried in and around the local churches. With a limited amount of space for burials, the oldest graves were regularly exhumed to free space for new burials. Despite the rapid growth in population, the amount of land set aside for use as graveyards remained unchanged at approximately 300 acres (0.5 sq mi; 1.2 km2), spread across around 200 small sites. Even relatively fresh graves had to be exhumed to free up space for new burials, their contents being unearthed and scattered. Decaying corpses contaminated the water supply, and the city suffered regular epidemics of cholera, smallpox, measles and typhoid. A royal commission established in 1842 to investigate the problem concluded that London's burial grounds had become so overcrowded that it was impossible to dig a new grave without cutting through an existing one. In 1848–49 a cholera epidemic killed 14,601 people in London and overwhelmed the burial system completely.
In the wake of public concerns following the cholera epidemics and the findings of a royal commission, the Burial Act 1852 (15 & 16 Vict. c. 85) was passed. Under this act, new burials were prohibited in what were then the built-up areas of London.
London Necropolis Company
Sir Richard Broun and Richard Sprye proposed to use the emerging technology of mechanised land transport to solve the problem of London's dead. Broun and Sprye envisaged buying a single very large tract of land around from London in Brookwood near Woking, Surrey, to be called Brookwood Cemetery or the London Necropolis.
At this distance, the land would be far beyond the maximum anticipated size of the city's growth, greatly reducing any potential hazards. The London and South Western Railway (LSWR) – which had connected London to Woking in 1838 – would enable bodies and mourners to be shipped from London to the site easily and cheaply. Although the Brookwood site was a long distance from London, Broun and Sprye argued that the speed of the railway made it both quicker and cheaper to reach than the seven existing cemeteries, all of which required a slow and expensive horse-drawn hearse to carry the body and mourners from London to the burial site.
On 30 June 1852 the promoters of the Brookwood scheme were given parliamentary consent to proceed, and the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company (LNC) was formed. The former Woking Common, owned by the Earl of Onslow at Brookwood was chosen as the site for the new cemetery. To prevent the LSWR from exploiting its monopoly on access to the cemetery, the local act of Parliament authorising the scheme, the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Act 1852 (15 & 16 Vict. c. cxlix) bound the LSWR to carry corpses and mourners to the cemetery in perpetuity and set a maximum tariff which could be levied on funeral traffic, but did not specify detail of how the funeral trains were to operate.
On 7 November 1854 the new cemetery opened and the southern Anglican section was consecrated by Charles Sumner, Bishop of Winchester. On 13 November the first scheduled London Necropolis Railway train left the new London Necropolis railway station for the cemetery, and the first burial (that of the stillborn twins of a Mr and Mrs Hore of Ewer Street, Southwark Borough) took place.
First station (1854–1902) A site for the London terminus near Waterloo had been suggested by Sir Richard Broun. Its proximity to the River Thames meant that bodies could be cheaply transported to the terminus by water from much of London, while being situated near three major Thames bridges meant that the area was easily accessed from both north and south of the river by road. The arches of the huge brick viaduct carrying the LSWR into Waterloo Bridge station (now London Waterloo station) were easily converted into mortuaries. Broun also felt that the journey out of London from Waterloo Bridge would be less distressing for mourners: while most of the rail routes out of London ran through tunnels and deep cuttings, or through densely populated areas, at this time the urban development of what is now south London had not taken place and the LSWR route ran almost entirely through parkland and countryside. The LNC also contemplated taking over the LSWR's former terminus at Nine Elms railway station (which following the 1848 opening of the much more convenient Waterloo Bridge station was used only for goods traffic, chartered trains taking migrants to North America, and the private trains of the royal family) as either the main or a secondary terminus. Despite objections from local residents concerned about the effects of potentially large numbers of dead bodies being stored in a largely residential area, in March 1854 the LNC settled on a single terminus in Waterloo and purchased a plot of land between Westminster Bridge Road and York Street (now Leake Street) for the site.
Architect William Tite and engineer William Cubitt drew up a design for a station, which was approved in June 1854. The station was completed in October 1854, at a total construction cost of £23,231 14s 4d (about £ in terms of spending power). On 13 November 1854 the first train left London for the new London Necropolis.
Tite and Cubitt's design was based around a three-storey main building, separated from the LSWR's main viaduct by a private access road beneath the LNC's twin rail lines. The private access road was intended to allow mourners to arrive and leave discreetly, and to avoid the need for hearses to stop in the public road. The ground floor contained a grand entrance hall and staircase for mourners attending first and second class funerals, a smaller entrance hall and staircase for those attending lower classes of funeral, and two mortuaries which occupied the majority of the floor. A large room adjacent to the mortuary held a reserve stock of around 300 coffins. Most mourners would have commissioned their own coffins, or used coffins bought by the deceased during their lifetime but, explained an official of the LNC (in 1898) the reserve of coffins was kept so that "should a guest die in a hotel, and the landlord wished to keep it quiet, we are notified, and in the middle of the night we come for the corpse, and take it away in one of our ready-made wooden overcoats". The first floor held the LNC's boardroom, the LNC's funerary workshops, a series of separate waiting rooms for those attending second and third class funerals, and the building's main toilets. The second floor, level with the LSWR railway line, held the train shed covering the two private rail lines and the single platform at which the trains stopped, eight or nine waiting rooms for first class mourners, and further toilets for their use. A steam-powered lift carried coffins from the lower floors to the platform level. A glass roof was positioned in order that no shadow be cast on the hearse carriage waiting at the platform at the time the trains were scheduled to depart, and the western wall was windowless to avoid passengers using the LSWR station being able to see into the Necropolis station. Glass panels inset between the two rail lines allowed sunlight through to the private access road below. Unlike most railway stations of the period, the designs of the first, second and third class waiting rooms were largely identical with only superficial differences.