London Necropolis Railway Station
The surviving ornate facade of the station that once ran funeral trains carrying London's dead out to a vast Surrey cemetery.
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The lowdown
In Victorian times London's graveyards were so dangerously overcrowded that a private company opened a vast new cemetery at Brookwood in Surrey and ran a dedicated railway to reach it. From a special terminus near Waterloo, the London Necropolis Railway carried coffins and mourners out to the country, with separate carriages by class and even by religion, the living and the dead travelling together.
The line ran from 1854 until the station was bombed in 1941. Its handsome arched entrance survives at 121 Westminster Bridge Road, easy to walk past without a clue to its macabre history. It is free to find, a quietly extraordinary relic of how the Victorians dealt with death.
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