London Necropolis Railway Station

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Former reception building at 121 Westminster Bridge Road

London Necropolis was a train station that connected Brookwood Cemetery to London . It was built in 1854 , destroyed except for the station building during the London Blitz in 1941 and not rebuilt after the war.

history

Since the removal of corpses in London became increasingly difficult in the 1850s due to the limited space, the London Necropolis Company established a large cemetery in Woking in the county of Surrey in 1852 , at the time the largest cemetery in the world. To ensure effective transportation, this company also built a train station, which was right next to Waterloo Station on the London and South Western Railway route . The station opened on November 13, 1854, it was at the intersection of York Street (now Leake Street) and Westminster Bridge Road. The death trains to Brookwood Cemetery consisted of three cars that carried both the coffins and the funeral party directly to a platform on the cemetery grounds. Until 1900 the trains ran daily, from then on “as required”, which until the 1930s led to a thinning of the frequency and a train sequence of two trains a week due to the increasing competition from road vehicles.

When Waterloo Station was rebuilt, Necropolis Station was relocated to property 121 Westminster Bridge Road in 1902. On April 16, 1941, a large part of the station building was razed to the ground during a German air raid. The station was not rebuilt, only the station building still exists today.

See also

literature

  • JM Clarke: The Brookwood Necropolis Railway . Locomotion Papers No. 143, The Oakwood Press, 1995, ISBN 0-85361-471-7

Coordinates: 51 ° 29 ′ 58 ″  N , 0 ° 6 ′ 49 ″  W.