In antiquity, they went by boat, ferried across the Styx by Charon, ruler of Virgil’s “dreary coast”. In sulphurous Victorian London, heaving with overcrowded graveyards, the dead allowed the train to take the strain – and the lush green fields around Brookwood, near Woking, became the place of no return.
When it opened in 1854, Brookwood Cemetery was the largest cemetery in the world. It occupied 500 acres of peaceful Surrey woodland, a world away from the capital's overflowing burial grounds, pushed to breaking point by cholera and unsanitary despair. And it was the railway that bridged the gap between the two.
The London Necropolis Company ran trains direct to Brookwood from its own city terminus near Waterloo, carrying corpses and mourners alike. Return tickets for the living; single tickets for the dead. The cemetery’s on-site stations – ‘North’ for nonconformists, ‘South’ for Anglicans – have since disappeared, with rail access now direct from the main line.
But the platforms remain, along with a short stretch of commemorative track; an evocative reminder of that lost Victorian journey from city smog to country grave.
Today Brookwood is still the largest cemetery in the UK, home to Britain’s first Muslim cemetery (1884), a plethora of Commonwealth war graves and, since 1862, the only Parsee burial ground in Europe. History whispers through the evergreens: at Brookwood death itself comes to life.
Here, reduced to the ranks of the departed, lie many eminent Victorians: painter John Singer Sargent who, despite his interest in glitz and glamour, has a distinctly modest grave; Shakespearean comedy actor Samuel Johnson; Pre-Raphaelite painter Evelyn De Morgan and her husband, William, an Arts and Crafts ceramicist.
In fact, it’s the De Morgans who possess one of Brookwood’s most notable tombstones. A visionary among the late 19th-century British symbolists, Evelyn was inspired by mythology and her work incorporated spiritualist and feminist ideas. Both she and her husband experimented with automatic writing, supposedly channelling messages from beyond the grave. Their joint tombstone – beautifully designed by Evelyn – bears a quote from this experiment: “Sorrow is only of the Earth; the life of the spirit is joy.”
In Victorian times, Brookwood was hailed as “a place of uncommon beauty” (Whitehall Review) with a “sense of peace, quietude and freedom” (The Times) – and it still is. But its dramatic statues bear witness to something else: the Gothic revival that so gripped the imagination of mid-Victorian England and beyond. Beautiful young angels gaze imploringly towards the heavens or mournfully down to earth, and there are also many outstanding effigies of the departed themselves, often crafted by the cemetery’s own stonemasons.
Such statues served as physical projections in time of a beloved individual: a woman seemingly turned to stone in the act of reading a book; delicate extended fingers holding a rose.
In Larkin’s immortal phrase: “What will survive of us is love.”
Brookwood Cemetery Society hosts guided walks, including a Halloween Walk on October 31st, 7 pm; £6.50 donation. Visit tbcs.org.uk or email: walks@tbcs.org.uk.
