London's Pyramid Of Death

When you think of London’s skyline, you probably picture the city’s iconic landmarks such as the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral, Tower Bridge, and the Shard. Yet all these famous sites would be completely dwarfed by a construction that was proposed nearly two hundred years ago. It would have stood 94 storeys tall, covered 18 acres, and housed the remains of some five million dead Londoners. This is the history of the Metropolitan Sepulchre.

By the early 19th century, London had become the largest city in the world. Its population had swelled from around 750,000 in 1760 to over 1.4 million by 1815. The city’s rapid growth was fuelled by the advancements made during the Industrial Revolution, which brought massive influxes of people from the surrounding areas into the nation’s capital in search of work. This transformed the city into a teeming metropolis, but its infrastructure failed to keep pace and soon began to struggle with supporting the exponentially increasing population. Not only did this pose problems for London’s living citizens, who required housing, sanitation, and transportation, but it also raised the question of what was to be done with them when they were dead.