By the middle of the nineteenth century, London's churchyards were full. Burial grounds in the city centre had become public health hazards, with bodies stacked in shallow graves and noxious gases seeping into neighbouring houses. Parliament had already established seven large suburban cemeteries -- the so-called Magnificent Seven -- but the scale of the problem demanded something more radical. In 1852, the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company was established by Act of Parliament, purchasing 2,000 acres of common land near the village of Brookwood, 25 miles southwest of London. The site was chosen for its sandy, well-drained soil, its distance from the capital, and its proximity to the London and South Western Railway, which could deliver both the dead and their mourners directly to the gates.

The London Necropolis Railway was one of the most unusual services in British transport history. Coffins were loaded at a private station adjacent to Waterloo, and the train ran to two stations within the cemetery grounds -- one for Anglicans, one for Nonconformists. Class distinctions extended beyond the grave: first-class tickets bought a better position in the cemetery and a more comfortable ride for mourners. At its peak, the railway carried thousands of burials a year, processing the city's dead with industrial efficiency and Victorian propriety. The London terminus was rebuilt in 1902 on Westminster Bridge Road, where it operated until a German bombing raid in April 1941 destroyed the building and ended the service. The southern terminus buildings in the cemetery survive, and the Necropolis Railway route can still be traced through the Surrey countryside.

Brookwood's enormous grounds became a microcosm of the British Empire and its alliances. Military sections hold the graves of soldiers from two world wars, including the Brookwood Military Cemetery maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which contains over 5,000 burials. National plots serve the dead of more than a dozen countries, including dedicated sections for American, Canadian, Czech, Polish, French, Italian, and Turkish service personnel. There are separate areas for Catholic, Muslim, Parsi, and Sikh burials. The Church of St Edward the Martyr, with its community of Greek Orthodox monks, stands within the cemetery grounds. In death, if not always in life, Brookwood gathered the world's communities together under the Surrey pines.

Walking the cemetery today is an exercise in reading England's social history through stone. Elaborate Victorian monuments give way to simpler Commonwealth headstones; military precision yields to overgrown corners where nature is reclaiming the paths. The cemetery is home to significant biodiversity, its undisturbed woodland harbouring species that have vanished from the surrounding suburbia of Woking. Notable burials range from suffragette Margaret Murray to Edward the Martyr -- or at least what the Russian Orthodox community believes to be his relics. The cemetery's sheer scale means that most visitors encounter only a fraction of it, walking for hours among the monuments without meeting another soul. It is a landscape designed for the dead that has become, paradoxically, one of the most peaceful places for the living in the whole of the Home Counties.