London Necropolis Company - Richard Broun and Richard Sprye

Richard Broun and Richard Sprye

An area of ground so distant as to be beyond any possible future extension of the Capital, sufficiently large to allow of its sub-division, not only into spacious distinct portions for the burial of each sect of the Christian Public, but also, if desired and deemed expedient, into as many separate compartments as there are parishes within London and its suburbs … a Mausoleum Church, with funeral chapels, private mausolea, vaults, and catacombs, large enough to contain, not only the thousands of coffins now lying within our numerous Metropolitan Churches, but also the coffins of all such dying in London, in this and future generations ... grand and befitting gathering place for the metropolitan mortality of a mighty nation; a last home and bed of rest where the ashes of the high and low, the mighty and the weak, the learned and the ignorant, the wicked and the good, the idle and the industrious, in one vast co-mingled heap may repose together.

— Sir Richard Broun, 1851

While the negotiations over the state taking control of burials were ongoing, an alternative proposal was being drawn up by Richard Broun and Richard Sprye. Broun and Sprye intended to use the emerging technology of mechanised land transport to provide a final solution to the problem of London's dead. They envisaged buying a single very large tract of land around 23 miles (37 km) from London in Brookwood near Woking, Surrey, to be called Brookwood Cemetery or the London Necropolis. At this distance, the land would be far beyond the maximum projected size of the city's growth, greatly reducing any potential hazards from miasma. In the 18th century this land had been nicknamed "the Waste of Woking", and with poor quality gravel soil it was of little use in farming and thus available very cheaply. The London and South Western Railway (LSWR)—which had connected London to Woking in 1838—would enable bodies and mourners to be shipped from London to the site easily and cheaply. Broun envisaged dedicated coffin trains, each carrying 50–60 bodies, travelling from London to the new Necropolis in the early morning or late at night, and the coffins being stored on the cemetery site until the time of the funeral. Mourners would then be carried to the appropriate part of the cemetery by a dedicated passenger train during the day.

Broun calculated that a 1,500-acre (2.3 sq mi; 6.1 km2) site would accommodate a total of 5,830,500 individual graves in a single layer. The legislation authorising Brookwood Cemetery did not permit mass graves at the site, and burials were restricted to one family per grave. If the practice of only burying a single family in each grave were abandoned and the traditional practice for pauper burials of ten burials per grave were adopted, the site was capable of accommodating 28,500,000 bodies. Assuming 50,000 deaths per year and presuming that families would often choose to share a grave, Broun calculated that even with the prohibition of mass graves it would take over 350 years to fill a single layer of the cemetery. Although the Brookwood site was a long distance from London, Broun and Sprye argued that the railway made it both quicker and cheaper to reach than the seven existing cemeteries, all of which required a slow and expensive horse-drawn hearse to carry the body and mourners from London to the burial site.