Unusual London

The London Necropolis Railway Station.

This was a special Railway Station constructed in the mid 19th. Century by the London Necropolis Company and was opened 13th. November 1854.

The London Necropolis Company and the National Mausoleum Company provided a solution to the problem of a lack of burial space for a rapidly growing population in London.
They purchased two thousand acres of land from Lord Onslow next to Brookwood Station to the west of Woking. They also brought a branch line off London and South Western Railway. The three carriage trains ran between York Street (now Leake Street) and two stations within the cemetery. North Station was for Roman Catholics, Jews, Parsees and other Dissenters and the Anglican South Station.

In 1902 the new building was opened at 121, Westminster Bridge Road.
The horse drawn funeral corteges would turn off the road and report to the office (which can still be seen through the railings). The cortege would then use either the lift or stairs to go up to the waiting train separated into first or third class.The coffin was slid into purpose built hearse carriages and the mourners would be seated in the adjoining carriages.
The Railway carried it’s last coffin and passengers in April 1941 when after several near misses the station was bombed by the Luftwaffe never to reopen.

All Hallows by the Tower

The Saxon Abbey of Barking founded the church of All Hallows by the Tower in 675 A.D. An arch from the original Saxon church remains.
Beneath the arch is a Roman pavement, discovered in 1926, evidence of city life on this site for the best part of two thousand years.
Following execution on Tower Hill, numerous beheaded bodies were brought into the church, including those of Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher and Archbishop Laud.
William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, was baptised in the church and educated in the schoolroom (now the Parish Room). John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the USA, was married in All Hallows in 1797.
In 1666 the Great Fire of London started in Pudding Lane, a few hundred yards from the church. All Hallows survived through the efforts of Admiral Penn, William Penn's father.
In 1940 Hitler's bombs succeeded where the Great Fire had failed. Only the tower and the walls remained but the late Queen Mother laid a new foundation stone in 1948, and she attended the re-dedication service some nine years later.
The Vicar at the time was "Tubby Clayton" founder of Toc H. The movement's lamp of maintenance still burns in the Lady Chapel and the founder's effigy and body rest in the church.

The Roman tessellated pavement, perfectly preserved in the Undercroft, is the floor of a domestic house in the late 2nd Century.
It has a gully in it thought to be the position of a wall showing plaster at the edges.

The Streetlamp Which Works Off The Gas From The Sewers?

Behind The Savoy Hotel in The Strand in London is the last working streetlamp which works off methane gas from the London sewers.

It is called the Patent Sewer Ventilating Lamp and the lamppost has been lighting Carting Street since the 1880's.

An underground pipe collects methane gas from the sewers and feeds it up to a small dome which fuels the lamp that safely burns away and lights the street.

The tomb of Sir Richard Burton

The most interesting tomb in St. Mary Magdalen's churchyard is the mausoleum in the shape of an Arab tent where the coffins of Sir Richard Burton and his wife Isabel Arundell can be seen through a window at the back.

Spookily Isabel's coffin lid has moved

Richard Burton lived from 1821-1890, at a time in history when exploration and scientific knowledge were advancing at a gallop. Full of the spirit of the age, Burton possessed a passionate curiosity about life in the little known Arab world and he persuaded the Royal Geographical Society in London to fund a series of adventures.

He was a brilliant linguist, utterly fearless and a master of disguise, and so was able to penetrate the cities of Medina and Mecca. He secretly drew plans of the Great Mosque and its sacred inner shrine, the Kaaba, at Mecca.
Inspired by his part as an Arab pilgrim he then went to Harar, which was totally forbidden to non-Moslems, and made notes about the East African slave trade.

His notebooks were crammed with information, geographical, commercial and anthropological. His travel books were a literary success in London and the Royal Geographical Society agreed to fund the next expedition - to find the source of the White Nile. He set of with John Hanning Speke but the two explorers fell out at Lake Tanganyika. Their dispute over the source caused a furore at the Royal Geographical Society which only ended with the sudden death of Speke in 1864.

His last Consulate was at Trieste, where he spent his last years quietly with Isabel. It was at this time that he privately published his translations from Arabic of the Karma Sutra and The Arabian Nights. He published 27 books in his lifetime.

When he died in 1890, Isabel built this mausoleum and paid for the stained glass Memorial Window in the church.