London Necropolis railway station, situated behind Waterloo, is under offer after being put on the market for £4.25 million, with pre-approved planning for eight luxury flats.
Dexters has confirmed 121 Waterloo Bridge Road is under offer, but has not provided anymore information.
The macabre site was used to transport an estimated 203,000 corpses from inner London to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, then the world’s largest graveyard.
Rapid industrialisation led to London’s population doubling from 1850 to 1851, and with many living in squalor frequent outbreaks of cholera meant inner city cemeteries were overflowing.
The London board of health declared: “London graveyards are all bad.
“Differing only in degrees of badness”.
Thus after the 1848 cholera epidemic the city commissioned a railway for the dead and Necropolis was opened in 1854.
Satirical Victorian magazine Punch joked: “A London churchyard is very like a London omnibus, it can carry any number.”
It was moved in 1902, and the grade II listed building for sale is all that remains of it’s second site after it was bombed in the blitz and the city decided it wasn’t financially viable to rebuild it.
Ever class obsessed, the station which had parlours for different levels of poshness and religion, so that relatives could say adieu to their loved ones without mixing with the masses.
Prices ranged from first class at £21, to nine shillings for a walking funeral, with one platform for the living, one for the dead.
Ever efficient, mourners could travel to Brookwood Cemetery and back in two hours in time for tea.
With an average life expectancy of 41, time for the living was a commodity in and of itself.
The station, which once housed a complex operation of mortuaries, a headstone shop and a pub, has since oscillated between being office space for a shipping firm, and redundant, save for any lingering ghosts.
Featured image found here licenced under creative commons.
