London Necropolis Company

http://www.all-laptopfan.com/,http://www.all-keyboard.com/ Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E420 Keyboard Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E420S Keyboard Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E425 Keyboard Lenovo ThinkPad Edge S420 Keyboard The London Necropolis Company (LNC), formally the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company until 1927,^{[note 1]} was a cemetery operator established by Act of Parliament in 1852 in reaction to the crisis caused by the closure of London's graveyards in 1851. HP Pavilion G61-336NR CPU Fan The LNC intended to establish a single cemetery large enough to accommodate all of London's future burials in perpetuity. The company's founders recognised that the recently invented technology of the railway provided the ability to conduct burials a long distance from populated areas, mitigating concerns over public health risks from living near burial sites. HP Pavilion dv7-6184ca CPU Fan Accordingly, the company bought a very large tract of land in Brookwood, Surrey, around 25 miles (40 km) from London, and converted a portion of it into Brookwood Cemetery. A dedicated railway line, the London Necropolis Railway, linked the new cemetery to the city. Financial mismanagement and internal disputes led to delays in the project. HP Pavilion dv7-3125eo CPU Fan By the time Brookwood Cemetery opened in late 1854, a number of other cemeteries had opened nearer to London or were in the process of opening. While some parishes in London did arrange for the LNC to handle the burials of their dead, many preferred to use nearer cemeteries. HP Pavilion dv7-2185dx CPU Fan The LNC had anticipated handling between 10,000 and 50,000 burials per year, but the number never rose above 4,100 per year, and in its first 150 years of operations only 231,730 burials had been conducted. Buying the land for Brookwood Cemetery and building the cemetery and railway had been very expensive, and by the time the cemetery opened the LNC was already on the verge of bankruptcy. IBM MCF-C10AM05 CPU Fan The LNC remained solvent by selling surplus parts of its land, but as the land had been chosen in the first place for its remoteness, sales were low. From the 1880s the LNC began a more aggressive programme to maximise its income. The process for the sale of surplus land was improved, resulting in increased income. SONY Vaio VGN-SZ2XP/C CPU Fan The LNC redeveloped its lands at Hook Heath, Wokinginto housing and a golf course, creating a new suburb of Woking and providing a steady income from rentals. After an 1884 ruling that cremation was lawful in England the LNC also took advantage of its proximity to Woking Crematorium by providing transport for bodies and mourners on its railway line and after 1910 by interring ashes in a dedicated columbarium. DELL Latitude E4300 CPU Fan The LNC also provided the land for a number of significant military cemeteries and memorials at Brookwood after both of the World Wars. In 1941 London Necropolis railway station, the LNC's London railway terminus, was badly damaged by bombing, and the London Necropolis Railway was abandoned. HP Pavilion dv7-2025es CPU Fan Rising property prices in Surrey in the 1940s and 1950s made the LNC increasingly valuable, but also made it a target for property speculators. In 1959 a hostile takeover succeeded, and LNC's independence came to an end. From 1959 to 1985 a succession of owners stripped the profitable parts of the business from the company, FUJITSU LifeBook A6030 CPU Fan leaving a rump residual company operating the increasingly derelict cemetery. In 1985 what remained of the company came into the ownership ofRamadan Güney, who set about reviving what remained. Links were formed with London's Muslim communities in an effort to encourage new burials, SONY Vaio VGN-FS115Z CPU Fan and a slow programme of clearing and restoring the derelict sections of the cemetery commenced. Although it was never as successful as planned, the LNC was very influential on both the funeral industry and the development of the area around Woking, and Brookwood Cemetery remains the largest cemetery in the United Kingdom. HP 532617-001 CPU Fan Since the conversion of London to Christianity in the early 7th century, the city's dead had been buried in and around the local churches.^[4] With a limited amount of space for burials, the oldest graves were regularly exhumed to free space for new burials, and the remains of the previous occupants transferred to charnel houses for storage.^[5] ACER Aspire 5730Z CPU Fan From the 14th century onwards the charnel houses themselves were overwhelmed, and exhumed bones were scattered where they had been dug up or reburied in pits.^[5] Despite this practice, by the mid 17th century the city was running seriously short of burial space.^[6] HP G56-126NR CPU Fan A proposal by Christopher Wren to use the reconstruction following the 1666 Great Fire of London as an opportunity to cease burials in the churchyards and establish newcemeteries outside the city was approved by the King and Parliament but vetoed by the Corporation of London, and burials continued at the newly rebuilt churches.^[7] HP Pavilion dv7-6166nr CPU Fan In the first half of the 19th century the population of London more than doubled, from a little under a million people in 1801 to almost two and a half million in 1851.^[8] Despite this rapid growth in population, the amount of land set aside for use as graveyards remained unchanged at approximately 300 acres (0.47 sq mi; 1.2 km²),^[8]spread across around 200 small sites.FUJITSU Lifebook A3210 CPU Fan The difficulty of digging without disturbing existing graves led to bodies often simply being stacked on top of each other to fit the available space and covered with a layer of earth.^[9] In more crowded areas even relatively fresh graves had to be exhumed to free up space for new burials, their contents being unearthed and scattered to free up space. DELL Precision M6400 CPU Fan In some cases large pits were dug on existing burial grounds, unearthing the previous burials, and fresh corpses crammed into the available space.^[10] Intact material from burials was sold on a thriving market in second hand coffin furniture, coffin wood was burned as household fuel, and exhumed bones were shipped in bulk to the north of England to be sold as fertiliser.^[ Compaq Presario CQ60-615DX CPU Fan Decaying corpses contaminated the water supply and the city suffered regular epidemics of cholera,smallpox, measles and typhoid;^[11] in 1842 the mean working life of a London professional man was 30 years and of a London labourer just 17 years.^[12] Public health policy at this time was shaped by the miasma theory HP Pavilion dv2660se CPU Fan (the belief that airborne particles released by decaying flesh were the primary factor in the spread of contagious illness), and the bad smells and risks of disease caused by piled bodies and exhumed rotting corpses caused great public concern.^[13] Toshiba Satellite L500-1XC CPU Fan ARoyal Commission established in 1842 to investigate the problem concluded that London's burial grounds had become so overcrowded that it was impossible to dig a new grave without cutting through an existing one.^[9] Commissioner and sanitation campaigner Edwin Chadwick testified that each year, DELL GM0503PEB1-8 (L2.M) CPU Fan 20,000 adults and 30,000 children were being buried in less than 218 acres (0.34 sq mi; 0.88 km²) of already full burial grounds;^[14] the Commission heard that one cemetery, Spa Fields in Clerkenwell, designed to hold 1,000 bodies, contained 80,000 graves, and that gravediggers throughout London were obliged to shred bodies in order to cram the remains into available grave space.^[9HP Pavilion dv7-1098eo CPU Fan ^] In 1848–49 a cholera epidemic killed 14,601 people in London and overwhelmed the burial system completely.^[15] Bodies were left stacked in heaps awaiting burial, and even relatively recent graves were exhumed to make way for new burials. In the wake of public concerns following the cholera epidemic and the findings of the Royal Commission, Toshiba Satellite A205-S5804 CPU Fan the Act to Amend the Laws Concerning the Burial of the Dead in the Metropolis (Burials Act) was passed in 1851. Under the Burials Act, new burials were prohibited in what were then the built-up areas of London.^[18] Seven large cemeteries had recently opened a short distance from London or were in the process of opening, HP Pavilion dv7-1240us CPU Fan and temporarily became London's main burial grounds.^[19] A proposal by Francis Seymour Haden to ship the bodies of London's dead to the Thames Estuary for use in land reclamation met with little approval, and the government sought alternative means to prevent the constantly increasing number of deaths in London from overwhelming the new cemeteries in the same manner in which it had overwhelmed the traditional burial grounds.^[20]  DELL yy529 CPU Fan The new suburban cemeteries had a combined size of just 282 acres (0.44 sq mi; 1.1 km²), and theBoard of Health did not consider any of them suitable for long-term use.^[21] As a long term solution to the crisis, Edwin Chadwick proposed the closure of all existing burial grounds in the vicinity of London other than the privately owned Kensal Green Cemetery in west London. Toshiba Qosmio G40-10E CPU Fan Kensal Green Cemetery was to be nationalised and greatly enlarged to provide a single burial ground for west London. A large tract of land on the Thames around 9 miles (14 km) southeast of London in Abbey Wood (on the site of present-day Thamesmead^[22]) was to become a single burial ground for east London.^[8] SONY Vaio VGN-CR407E CPU Fan All bodies would be shipped by river and canal to the new cemeteries, bringing an end to burials in London itself.^[20] The Treasury was sceptical that Chadwick's scheme would ever be financially viable. It also met with widespread public concerns about the impact of monopoly control of the burial industry, HP Pavilion dv6-3131tx Laptop CPU Cooling Fan and about the government taking control of an industry previously controlled by religious bodies and private entrepreneurs.^[23] The process of decomposition was still poorly understood and it was generally believed that ¹²⁄₁₃ (92%) of a decaying corpse was dispersed as gas; HP 622029-001 Laptop CPU Cooling Fan local authorities in the vicinity of the proposed new cemeteries were horrified at the prospect of an estimated 3,000,000 cubic feet (85,000 m³) per year of miasma (disease-carrying vapour) spreading from the cemeteries across surrounding areas.^[20] Although the Metropolitan Interments Act 1850 authorised Chadwick's scheme to proceed,^[23Toshiba Satellite L675D-S7047 Laptop CPU Cooling Fan ^] the Metropolitan Interment Amendment Act 1852 repealed the authorisation. 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, HP Pavilion dv7-4170ez Laptop CPU Cooling Fan but also, if desired and deemed expedient, into as many separate compartments as there are parishes within London and its suburbs … [and] 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, HP Pavilion dv4-1506tx Laptop CPU Cooling Fan but also the coffins of all such dying in London, in this and future generations ... [A] 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. Compaq Presario CQ61-411WM Laptop CPU Cooling Fan 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.^{[note 3]} 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.^[23] IBM FRU 46L4753 Laptop CPU Cooling Fan 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.^[1] 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.^[28HP Pavilion dv6-3190sf Laptop CPU Cooling Fan In the 18th century this land had been nicknamed "the Waste of Woking",^[29] and with poor quality gravel soil it was of little use in farming and thus available very cheaply.^[30] 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.^[23] SONY Vaio VGN-FZ21E Laptop CPU Cooling Fan 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.^[31] Mourners would then be carried to the appropriate part of the cemetery by a dedicated passenger train during the day. HP G42-415DX Laptop CPU Cooling Fan 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.^[23] The legislation authorising Brookwood Cemetery did not permit mass graves at the site, and burials were restricted to one family per grave.^[ HP 646578-001 Laptop CPU Cooling Fan 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.^[23] Assuming 50,000 deaths per year and presuming that families would often choose to share a grave, HP KSB06105HA CPU Fan Broun calculated that even with the prohibition of mass graves it would take over 350 years to fill a single layer of the cemetery.^[35] 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,  Dell Latitude E6500 Laptop CPU Cooling Fan all of which required a slow and expensive horse-drawn hearse to carry the body and mourners from London to the burial site. Shareholders in the LSWR were concerned at the impact the cemetery scheme would have on the normal operations of the railway. SONY Vaio VGN-NR120Q Laptop CPU Cooling Fan At a shareholders' meeting in August 1852 concerns were raised about the impact of funeral trains on normal traffic and of the secrecy in which negotiations between the LSWR and the promoters of the cemetery were conducted.^[3] The LSWR management pledged that no concessions would be made to the cemetery operators, Toshiba Satellite A205-S5879 Laptop CPU Cooling Fan other than promising them the use of one train each day.^[3] Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London was hostile in general to railway funeral schemes, arguing that the noise and speed of the railways was incompatible with the solemnity of the Christian burial service. HP KSB06105HA Laptop CPU Cooling Fan Blomfield also considered it inappropriate that the families of people from very different backgrounds would potentially have to share a train, and felt that it demeaned the dignity of the deceased for the bodies of respectable members of the community to be carried on a train also carrying the bodies and relatives of those who had led immoral livesToshiba Satellite L645D-S4056 Laptop CPU Cooling Fan ^4]Meanwhile Henry Drummond, Member of Parliament for the West Surrey constituency which covered the Brookwood site, James Mangles, MP for the nearby constituency of Guildford, and labour reform campaigner Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury) lobbied against the proposal. HP Pavilion dv6-2016ax Laptop CPU Cooling Fan Drummond considered the scheme a front for land speculation, believing that the promoters only intended to use 400 acres (0.63 sq mi; 1.6 km²) for the cemetery and to develop the remaining 80% for building;^{[40][note 5]} Mangles felt that the people of Woking were not being fairly compensated for the loss of their historic rights to use the common lands;^[40] SONY Vaio VGN-CR11S/P Laptop CPU Cooling Fan Ashley felt that the Metropolitan Interments Act 1850 had been a victory for the campaign to end private profiteering from death and that the new scheme would reverse these gains, and was also concerned about the health implications of diseased bodies being transported to and stored at the London terminus in large numbers while awaiting trains to Brookwood. HP Pavilion dv7-6b55dx Laptop CPU Cooling Fan Despite the opposition, on 30 June 1852 the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Act 1852 was passed, giving the Brookwood scheme Parliamentary consent to proceed.^[42] The former Woking Common at Brookwood, owned by the Earl of Onslow, was chosen as the site for the new cemetery.^[43] APPLE MacBook Pro 15 inch MA610LL Laptop CPU Cooling Fan To prevent the LSWR from exploiting its monopoly on access to the cemetery, the private Act of Parliament authorising the scheme bound the LSWR to carry corpses and mourners to the cemetery in perpetuity and set a maximum tariff which could be levied on funeral traffic, but did not specify details of how the funeral trains were to operate.^[44] HP G71-340US Laptop CPU Cooling Fan By this time, Broun and Sprye had lost control of the scheme. On 1 April 1851 a group of trustees led by Poor Law Commissioner William Voules purchased the rights to the scheme from Broun and Sprye for £20,000 (about £1.59 million in terms of 2014 consumer spending power) and, once the Act of Parliament had been passed, HP Pavilion dv7-6166nr Laptop CPU Cooling Fan founded the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company on their own without regard to their agreement with the original promoters.^[44][45] These trustees proved inept, wasting large sums of money;^[42] meanwhile Richard Broun lobbied vigorously against the "misrepresentations and ambiguous assertions" of the new trustees.^[40] HP Pavilion dv6-3050et Laptop CPU Cooling Fan With financiers sceptical of the scheme's viability Voules and his trustees were unable to raise the funds to buy the proposed site from Lord Onslow.^[43] In early 1853, amid widespread allegations of voting irregularities and with the company unable to pay promised dividends, a number of the directors resigned, including Voules, and the remaining public confidence in the scheme collapsed.^[ Dell Vostro 3500 Laptop CPU Cooling Fan Broun's scheme had envisaged the cemetery running along both sides of the LSWR main line and divided by religion, with separate private railway halts on the main line, each incorporating a chapel, to serve each religion's section.^[46] The new consulting engineer to the company, HP KSB06105HA Laptop CPU Cooling Fan William Cubitt, rejected this idea and recommended a single site to the south of the railway line, served by a private branch line through the cemetery.^[47] The company also considered Broun's plan for dedicated coffin trains unrealistic, arguing that relatives would not want the coffins to be shipped separately from the deceased's family. HP Pavilion dv5-2135dx Laptop CPU Cooling Fan In September 1853 a Committee of Enquiry into the mismanagement of the company recommended the expulsion of the four remaining trustees and the reform of the company under a new board of directors.^[49] This was unanimously approved by the shareholders, and work finally began on the scheme.^[43] HP Pavilion dv7t-6100 CTO Laptop CPU Cooling Fan A 2,200-acre (3.4 sq mi; 8.9 km²) tract of land stretching from Woking to Brookwood was purchased from Lord Onslow.^[29][46] The westernmost 400 acres (0.62 sq mi; 1.6 km²), at the Brookwood end, were designated the initial cemetery site,^[46] and a branch railway line was built from the LSWR main line into this section.^[ Compaq Presario CQ61-435SA Laptop CPU Cooling Fan A plot of land between Westminster Bridge Road and York Street (now Leake Street) was chosen as the site for the London railway terminus.^[50] ArchitectWilliam Tite and engineer William Cubitt drew up a design for a station, which was approved in June 1854,^[51] and completed in October 1854.^[29 ASUS M51SE Laptop CPU Cooling Fan ^] In July 1854 work began on the drainage of the marshlands designated as the initial cemetery site, and on the construction of the embankment carrying the railway branch into the cemetery.^{[52][note 7]} With the ambition to become London's sole burial site in perpetuity, HP G42-415DX Laptop CPU Cooling Fan the LNC were aware that if their plans were successful, their Necropolis would become a site of major national importance.^[53] As a consequence, the cemetery was designed with attractiveness in mind, in contrast to the squalid and congested London burial grounds and the newer suburban cemeteries which were already becoming crowded.^[ ACER Aspire 4736ZG Laptop CPU Cooling Fan The LNC aimed to create an atmosphere of perpetual spring in the cemetery, and chose the plants for the cemetery accordingly. It had already been noted that evergreen plants from North America thrived in the local soil.^[54] Robert Donald, the owner of an arboretumnear Woking, was contracted to supply the trees and shrubs for the cemetery.^[55]  HP Pavilion dv4-1133tx Laptop CPU Cooling Fan The railway line through the cemetery and the major roads and paths within the cemetery were lined with giant sequoia trees, the first significant planting of these trees (only introduced to Europe in 1853) in Britain.^[54] As well as the giant sequoias, the grounds were heavily planted with magnolia, rhododendron, coastal redwood, azalea,andromeda and monkeypuzzle,  HP Pavilion dv6-3043ee Laptop CPU Cooling Fan with the intention of creating perpetual greenery with large numbers of flowers and a strong floral scent throughout the cemetery.^{[54][note 8]} On 7 November 1854 the new cemetery opened and the southern Anglican section was consecrated by Charles Sumner, Bishop of Winchester. At the time it was the largest cemetery in the world.^[59]  Compaq Presario CQ61-421SG Laptop CPU Cooling Fan   On 13 November the first scheduled train left the new London Necropolis railway station for the cemetery, and the first burial (that of the stillborn twins of a Mr and Mrs Hore of Ewer Street, Borough) took place. A very few years ago, the idea of founding a cemetery for the metropolis which should be more than 20 miles distant from it would have been looked upon as an absurdity. YHP Pavilion dv6-1101au Laptop CPU Cooling Fan esterday, however, saw the practical embodiment of this idea … A short distance beyond the Woking station, the country, without varying from its general character of sterility and hardness of outline, becomes gently undulating and offers features which, with some assistance from art, might be made more than pleasing. HP Pavilion dv6-3125er Laptop CPU Cooling Fan Here is the London Necropolis, which certainly throws into the shade any previous attempts at extramural interments.It was fitting enough that the largest city in the world should have, as it will now have, the largest cemetery in the world.As the Brookwood site had been intentionally chosen for its distance from London, at the time of its opening the only practical way to reach the cemetery was by railway.^[23] HP 606575-001 Laptop CPU Cooling Fan William Cubitt decided that the terrain of the initial cemetery site was best suited to a railway branch from the LSWR at the west of the cemetery, and work began on the earthworks and rails for the new branch in early September 1854.^[47] The single-track branch was completed in time for the opening two months later.^[47]  HP Pavilion dv7-6185us Laptop CPU Cooling Fan