The Victorian Graveyard London Tried to Forget

In the 1840s, London was burying fifty thousand people a year in fewer than two hundred and eighteen acres of ground, stacking bodies twenty deep, poisoning the water supply, and creating conditions so foul that gravediggers collapsed from the fumes. This documentary traces the crisis from the overcrowded churchyards through the horror of Enon Chapel, the campaign of surgeon George Alfred Walker, and the creation of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries and the London Necropolis Railway. It reveals how London's green parks and garden squares today sit quietly above a city built on its dead.