Brookwood Cemetery

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA · EN · 04/10/2026

Brookwood Cemetery, also known as the London Necropolis, is a burial ground in Brookwood, Surrey, England. It is the largest cemetery in the United Kingdom and one of the largest in Europe. The cemetery is listed a Grade I site in the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

The Church of St Edward the Martyr with its community of Greek Orthodox monks is located in the cemetery grounds.

History

Background

Brookwood Cemetery was conceived by the London Necropolis Company (LNC) in 1849 to house London's deceased, at a time when the capital was finding it difficult to accommodate its increasing population, both living and dead. The cemetery is said to have been landscaped by architect William Tite, but this is disputed.

Brookwood Cemetery's initial owner was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1852, and the cemetery was consecrated by Charles Sumner, Bishop of Winchester, on 7 November 1854 (apart from its northern section, reserved for Nonconformists). It was opened to the public on 13 November 1854 when the first burials took place. It was the largest cemetery in the world in 1854, but has since lost that distinction.

In 1857 actor John W. Anson acquired 1 acre of land there, the Actors' Acre, for the 'Dramatic, Equestrian and Musical Sick Fund Association' as a burial place for actors and their relatives.

In 1858 the London Necropolis Company sold 64 acre of the extra land to the government for the building of Woking Convict Invalid Prison.

Necropolis Railway

Brookwood originally was accessible by rail from a special station – the London Necropolis railway station – next to Waterloo station in Central London. Trains had passenger carriages reserved for different classes and other carriages for coffins (also for different classes), and ran into the cemetery on a dedicated branch from the adjoining South West Main Line – there was a junction just to the west of Brookwood station. From there, passengers and coffins were transported by horse-drawn vehicles. The original London Necropolis station was relocated in 1902 but its successor was demolished after suffering bomb damage during World War II. Return tickets were issued for mourners and single tickets for the dead.

There were two stations in the cemetery: North for non-conformists and South for Anglicans. Their platforms still exist along the path called Railway Avenue. For visitors wishing to use the South West Main Line, Brookwood station has provided direct access since June 1864. A very short piece of commemorative track, with signpost and plaque, purposefully gives way to a grass field and recollects the old final stage of the journey of the deceased.

It was the cholera epidemic of 1848 that led two industrialists to develop this high burial site. It was at first a controversial project. The Bishop of London condemned the "offensive" despatch of first-, second- and third-class corpses in the same carriages, so this had to be modified.

Early burials

The LNC offered three classes of funerals:

A first class funeral allowed buyers to select the grave site of their choice anywhere in the cemetery. The LNC charged extra for burials in some designated special sites. At the time of opening prices began at £2 10s (about £ in terms) for a basic 9 x with no special coffin specifications. It was expected by the LNC that those using first class graves would erect a permanent memorial of some kind in due course following the funeral.

Second class funerals cost £1 (about £ in terms) and allowed some control over the burial location. The right to erect a permanent memorial cost an additional 10 shillings (about £ in terms); if a permanent memorial was not erected the LNC reserved the right to re-use the grave in future.

Third class funerals were reserved for pauper funerals; those buried at parish expense in the section of the cemetery designated for that parish. Although the LNC was forbidden from using mass graves (other than the burial of next of kin in the same grave) and thus even the lowest class of funeral provided a separate grave for the deceased, third class funerals were not granted the right to erect a permanent memorial on the site. (The families of those buried could pay afterwards to upgrade a third class grave to a higher class if they later wanted to erect a memorial, but this practice was rare.) Despite this, Brookwood's pauper graves granted more dignity to the deceased than did other graveyards and cemeteries of the period, all of which other than Brookwood continued the practice of mass graves for the poor.

Brookwood was one of the few cemeteries to permit burials on Sundays, which made it a popular choice with the poor as it allowed people to attend funerals without the need to take a day off work. As theatrical performances were banned on Sundays at this time, it also made Brookwood a popular choice for the burial of actors for the same reason, to the extent that actors were provided with a dedicated section of the cemetery near the station entrance.

While the majority of burials conducted by the LNC (around 80%) were pauper funerals on behalf of London parishes and prisons, the LNC also reached agreement with a number of societies, guilds, religious bodies and similar organisations (such as Woking Convict Invalid Prison and Tothill Fields House of Correction). The LNC provided dedicated sections of the cemetery for these groups, on the basis that those who had lived or worked together in life could remain together after death. Although the LNC was never able to gain the domination of London's funeral industry for which its founders had hoped, it was very successful at targeting specialist groups of artisans and trades, to the extent that it became nicknamed "the Westminster Abbey of the middle classes". The Royal Hospital Chelsea, which previously buried their inmate pensioners at Brompton Cemetery in Chelsea, have used Brookwood Cemetery, where they have two plots, since 1893.

A large number of these dedicated plots were established, ranging from Chelsea Pensioners and the Ancient Order of Foresters to the Corps of Commissionaires and the LSWR. The Nonconformist cemetery also includes a Parsee burial ground established in 1862, which remained the only Zoroastrian burial ground in Europe. Dedicated sections in the Anglican cemetery were also reserved for burials from those parishes which had made burial arrangements with the LNC.

The first burial was of the stillborn twins of a Mr and Mrs Hore of Ewer Street, The Borough. The Hore twins, along with the other burials on the first day, were pauper funerals and buried in unmarked graves. The first burial at Brookwood with a permanent memorial was that of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Goldfinch, buried on 25 November 1854, the 26th person to be buried in the cemetery. The first permanent memorial erected in the Nonconformist section of the cemetery was that of Charles Milligan Hogg, son of botanist Robert Hogg, buried on 12 December 1854. Goldfinch and Hogg's graves are not the oldest monuments in the cemetery, as on occasion gravestones were relocated and re-erected during the relocation of existing burial grounds to Brookwood.

Over 235,000 people have been buried there.

Reburials

The massive London civil engineering projects of the mid-19th century—the railways, the sewer system and from the 1860s the precursors to the London Underground—often necessitated the demolition of existing churchyards. The first major relocation took place in 1862, when the construction of Charing Cross railway station and the routes into it necessitated the demolition of the burial ground of Cure's College in Southwark, which uncovered at least 7,950 bodies. These were packed into 220 large containers, each containing 26 adults plus children, and shipped on the London Necropolis Railway to Brookwood for reburial, along with at least some of the existing headstones from the cemetery.

At least 21 London burial grounds were relocated to Brookwood via the railway, along with numerous others relocated by road following the railway's closure. Churches whose graves were relocated included:

St Michael, Crooked Lane (demolished 1831, burial ground cleared 1987)

St Antholin, Budge Row (demolished 1875)

All-Hallows-the-Great (demolished 1894)

St Magnus-the-Martyr (remains removed from crypt 1894)

All-Hallows-the-Less (destroyed in the Great Fire of London, remains removed 1896)

St Michael Wood Street (demolished 1897)

St Mildred, Bread Street (remains removed 1898, church destroyed in London Blitz 1941)

St George the Martyr, Southwark (remains removed 1899)

St George Botolph Lane (demolished 1904)

St Peter's Church, Eaton Square (crypt cleared 1951)

St Marylebone Parish Church (remains from crypt removed 1987)

St Luke Old Street (closed 1959, remains from crypt removed 2000)

St James's Church, Piccadilly (remains removed from St. James's Garden, established 1878 on the former burial grounds of the church, from 2017–2020 due to HS2 terminal construction at Euston Station) - the largest exhumation in British history.

The unconsecrated Cross Bones Graveyard in Southwark (closed 1853, many remains removed in successive years)

Brookwood Cemetery and cremation

In 1878, the LNC sold an isolated piece of its land at Brookwood, close to St John's village, to the Cremation Society of Great Britain, on which they built Woking Crematorium, the first in Britain, in 1879. While the LNC never built its own crematorium, in 1910, Lord Cadogan decided he no longer wanted to be interred in the mausoleum he had commissioned at Brookwood. This building, the largest mausoleum in the cemetery, was bought by the LNC, fitted with shelves and niches to hold urns, and used as a dedicated columbarium from then on.

After 1945 cremation, up to that time an uncommon practice, became increasingly popular in Britain. In 1946, the LNC obtained consent to build their own crematorium on a section of the Nonconformist cemetery which had been set aside for pauper burials, but chose not to proceed. Instead, in 1945, the LNC began the construction of the Glades of Remembrance, a wooded area dedicated to the burial of cremated remains. These were dedicated by Henry Montgomery Campbell, Bishop of Guildford in 1950. Intentionally designed for informality, traditional gravestones and memorials were prohibited, and burials were marked only by small 2 to stones.

In the next decade, the cemetery came closest to having its own crematorium. Following the closure of the two Brookwood railway stations, the land surrounding the site of South station and the station's two Anglican chapels was redundant. As part of the (4 & 5 Eliz. 2. c. lxviii), the LNC obtained parliamentary consent to convert the disused original Anglican chapel into a crematorium, using the newer chapel for funeral services and the station building for coffin storage and as a refreshment room for those attending cremations. Suffering cash flow problems and distracted by a succession of hostile takeover bids, the LNC management never proceeded with the scheme and the buildings fell into disuse. The station building was demolished after being damaged by a fire in 1972, although the platform remained intact.

Horticultural

With the ambition for it to become London's sole burial site in perpetuity, the LNC were aware that if their plans were successful, their Necropolis would become a site of major national importance. As a consequence, the cemetery was designed with attractiveness in mind, in contrast to the squalid and congested London burial grounds and the newer suburban cemeteries which were already becoming crowded.

The LNC aimed to create an atmosphere of perpetual spring in the cemetery, and chose the plants for the cemetery accordingly. It had already been noted that evergreen plants from North America thrived in the local soil. Robert Donald, the owner of an arboretum near Woking, was contracted to supply the trees and shrubs for the cemetery. The railway line through the cemetery and the major roads and paths within the cemetery were lined with giant sequoia trees, the first significant planting of these trees (only introduced to Europe in 1853) in Britain. As well as the giant sequoias (also known as Wellingtonia after the recently deceased Duke of Wellington), the grounds were heavily planted with magnolia, rhododendron, coastal redwood, azalea, andromeda and monkeypuzzle, with the intention of creating perpetual greenery with large numbers of flowers and a strong floral scent throughout the cemetery.

In later years the original planting of the cemetery was supplemented by numerous other tree species planted by the LNC, as well as many plants planted by mourners at burial sites and around mausolea. Between the end of LNC independence in 1959 and the cemetery's purchase by Ramadan Güney in 1985 cemetery maintenance was drastically reduced, and the spread of various plant types caused many of the non-military sections of the cemetery to revert to wilderness in this period.

20th and 21st centuries

In August 1914, on the outbreak of the First World War, the LNC offered to donate to the War Office 1 acre of land "for the free interment of soldiers and sailors who have returned from the front wounded and may subsequently die". The offer was not taken up until 1917, when a section of the cemetery was set aside as Brookwood Military Cemetery, used for the burials of service personnel who died in the London District. This purpose built cemetery came to accommodate further dead from World War II.

In the meantime, 141 Commonwealth service personnel were buried from London in scattered graves throughout the cemetery, apart from a small Nurses' Plot in St Peter's Avenue in the Westminster field (where are buried nurses from Millbank Military Hospital) and an Indian plot (including one unidentified soldier) in the North-West corner.

Source and attribution

Adapted from “Brookwood Cemetery” by English Wikipedia contributors. Main paragraphs and sections are retained; tables, reference markers and technical markup are omitted. This is an encyclopedic adaptation, not a personal review. Original revision and contributor history ↗. Text is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗. Check current visitor access, tickets and transport with the relevant operator.