The Truth Behind: The Death Express

The 19th century was an overcrowded time in the capital, a restless time, and a smelly time - yuck! They didn’t call it ‘The Great Stink’ for nothing.

You see the problem was that the population in London had doubled in size from 1800 to 1850. While some had more than a few bob to their name, most common folk huddled together in cold, dark and grimy slums, with rats for roommates and their raw sewage sludge (poo to you and me) oozing straight onto the street and into the River Thames. Bleugh!

It was a mucky, disease-ridden city - fifteen thousand Londoner’s died in the 1848 cholera epidemic alone. But even for the dead, there was to be no rest.

With all this dying going on, London’s cemeteries were stuffed to bursting. Families resorted to digging up rotting bodies that had only been laid to rest a few months previously. They tossed the stiffs aside, before burying their own breathless relatives - but for how long they would be down there - who knew? Grave robbers, on the other hand, were having a tremendous time! Their jobs became (quite literally) a walk in the park as they nicked jewellery off the corpses and even pilfered the bones and remains to sell on to anatomy surgeons. What gents!

The Victorians were a horrible bunch, but they were a proper bunch, and they weren’t going to stand for this with their dead for much longer! So a huge new cemetery was built in Brookwood, Woking. And the largest graveyard in Western Europe it became. A gigantic two hundred thousand acres and capable of holding twenty-eight and a half million coffins! It would become a second London underground - just this one with a little less life!