one-way ticket

Via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (much more to explore here), we receive a lightly macabre update to the former dedicated rail-line in London that transported the departed and mourners from the overcrowded city out to a cemetery in Woking with news that the purpose-built Waterloo Necropolis station built in 1854 (expanded in 1901) will be transformed into a suite of flats. The seal is that of the company granted the charter to construct the grounds and arrange the logistics and transportation. Though large portions of the building were destroyed in World War II during a 1941 air raid, what remains is witness to the automation of the funerary arts with halls designed for private service and hydraulic lifts to bring the briers on to the loading docks below, a shift towards hygienic awareness (a dread cholera epidemic decades earlier had overwhelmed London’s graveyards) and separate entrances that showed that even the dead were expected to be class conscious.