The final journey for London’s dead, circa 1860, was a trip on the London Necropolis Railway. The train would take the corpse and the accompanying mourners out of the city to the sprawling Brookwood Cemetery, where they had their pick of two stations: one for Anglicans, one for Non-Conformists. The deceased rode first, second, or third class (to avoid posthumous intermingling of rich and poor). But naturally, all coffin tickets were one way only.
Brookwood Cemetery was established in 1854 by the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company. Founded in response to a crisis of overcrowding in London’s churchyards, it was intended to hold all of London’s dead, for the rest of time—the vast majority of them in unmarked paupers’ graves.
At the time, the city’s population had grown far beyond what its existing patchwork of small graveyards could accommodate. Gravediggers forced as many bodies into one grave as they could, sometimes breaking apart the cadavers “with choppers and pickaxes” in order to make them fit. While they were at it, they could make a little extra cash by stripping down the old caskets to resell the handles and nails. Graves were reopened so often that the grass had no time to grow over them. Death was not dignified: the dearly departed lay in black mud scattered with litter.
A series of cholera epidemics, starting in 1832, turned the situation from an aesthetic nuisance into a serious health hazard. Rumors circulated about people who died gruesome deaths after simply breathing in the miasmatic vapors that rolled off an open grave.
In 1850, a new Burials Act banned the use of churchyards for future burials, necessitating a speedy solution for London’s dead. The very next year, the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company purchased a massive tract of land outside the city on a major rail line. Besides providing ample room, the company developed a cheap “earth-to-earth” coffin, made of biodegradable wood pulp, which would speed decomposition rather than allowing unwholesome vapours to linger.
Not everyone was a fan. The bishop of London, for one, was a firm opponent. He was concerned about the impropriety of a for-profit company dealing with the dead, and disturbed that all of London’s dead—however upstanding or immoral they may have been in life—would travel together on the same train, and wind up in the same final resting place. Nor was the clatter and bustle of a railway journey compatible, in his view, with the solemnity of a funeral.
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Though the bishop didn’t say it, the cemetery represented a blow to the authority of the church. Burials had been a religious matter for centuries; the founding of privately owned, nondenominational cemeteries marked a massive shift away from the status quo. For the first time, people of all sects would be buried together; uniquely for its time, Brookwood Cemetery even had a section for people of the Zoroastrian faith.
Brookwood Cemetery was just one example of many in the burgeoning “garden cemetery” movement. The movement is usually traced back to Père Lachaise in Paris, established in 1804, although cemetery designer John Claudius Loudon cited the much older park-like cemeteries of Istanbul and Persia among his inspirations.
Garden cemeteries were suburban or rural landscapes designed to evoke rest and renewal. A visitor to one such garden cemetery exclaimed: “A glance at this beautiful cemetery almost excites a wish to die”—a far cry from the austere memento mori of a cluttered medieval churchyard. The new cemeteries were places of rest for the dead, but also places of leisure for the living.
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The Victorian era was the golden age of mourning, the sentimental demands of the period driving an entire industry—from dark veils and jet-black jewelry to custom brooches woven from the dearly departed’s hair. As historian Cornelia D. J. Pearsall points out in her analysis of the Duke of Wellington’s funeral, Victorians were caught between two competing impulses: an “anxious repulsion of the dead,” which drove a series of public health reforms, and “a profound attachment to remains.” The dead are our dear ones—beloved friends and family, honored ancestors. At the same time, they are decaying matter—frightening, and perhaps even dangerous.
Today, London is once again running out of room for graves. The City of London Cemetery and Crematorium has begun to reuse the old ones—this time with a great deal more care and respect for the dead, both old and new. You can even reuse headstones: flip them around, and carve new names and dates on the back. In a city where burial space has always been precious, even the dead must make room for those who come after.
