London Necropolis railway station

London Necropolis railway station stood in Waterloo, London, as the terminus of a short-lived line built to carry the dead out of the city. It opened in 1854 beside the brick arches of the London and South Western Railway’s approach to Waterloo Bridge station. The building had private waiting rooms for mourners and a hydraulic lift to raise coffins to platform level. Existing railway arches nearby stored bodies before burial. The line ran on ordinary tracks owned by the LSWR, using their locomotives and carriages. The railway answered a public-health crisis caused by overcrowded graveyards. In the 1840s cholera killed thousands and graves were dug through old ones. A royal commission found it impossible to bury the dead without cutting through existing graves. Parliament passed the Burial Act 1852, banning new burials in built-up London. Sir Richard Broun and Richard Sprye proposed Brookwood Cemetery twenty-three miles away, reached by the LSWR. Visitors today see only the surviving office at 121 Westminster Bridge Road. The rest of the station was destroyed in an air raid on 16 April 1941. The remaining building still stands, relatively unchanged since the early 20th century. Its plain façade offers no hint of the funeral trains that once left from here. The arches that once held the dead remain part of the wider railway landscape.