A lot of folks don’t know about this, that it was a real railway system that ran from 1854 to 1941.
Necropolis, by the way, is translated as “City of the Dead”. And indeed, this is what it was. No one in the Middle Ages could have imagined that London — the second biggest city in Europe back then (Paris was bigger) — would ever become too full in their many churchyards to bury the dead. And so in 1854, the first and last railway to ferry corpses and mourners between London and the newly opened Brookwood Cemetery — 23 miles southwest of London in Brookwood, Surrey — was open for business.
And by the way, in 1854 trains, as such, were pretty new things. The idea to transport bodies out of the city for burial was completely unique and might have gone on had not the Nazis bombed the railway in 1941. The city decided not to repair and renew the trains for that line.
It wasn’t quite as successful as the owners of the LNR had hoped it would be. They had planned to carry between 10,000 and 50,000 bodies per year, but after 87 years of operation, only slightly over 200,000 burials had been performed in Brookwood Cemetery, coming to roughly 2,300 bodies per year.
It was the practice prior to this crisis, to exhume older burials and to bury newer “arrivals”. What did they do with the old bones? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s possible that the bones were buried all around the churchyard because they would take up considerably less space, but as we know how people are, it was also possible that they merely discarded them in the rubbish. Capitalism, don’t you know. Hundreds of years old corpses wouldn’t quite have any descendents who might care to complain.
But by 1851, with the emergence of rudimentary rail travel, rural people were migrating to the cities for jobs in factories and never went back. It DOUBLED the population of London, Glasgow, and other big cities. So naturally, when people died, they soon ran out of space.
What a novel idea. Victorians were certainly innovative. They had to be. And because it was such an interesting concept to me, it became a major plot point in the second of my gaslamp/steampunk fantasy series, the Enchanter Chronicles, CLOCKWORK GYPSY, run by Goblins, no less! Right along a leyline in order to grow the Goblins’ power. You’ll have to read the book for more on that!
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I was happy to receive this in my Email Jeri, I never knew this happened in London, and the book sounds fun to read as well, thank you!!
It’s wild, isn’t it? You just never know where research will take you. Or networking. A friend mentioned it, I never heard of it, I looked it up. Made a great plot turn. It’s a fun series.