Brookwood Circular
18 January 2025. This short walk is perfect for a winter’s day escape from the city with a fairly quick train journey from central London, however, railway engineering works, although still straightforward, meant that the travelling time was three times as long. Nevertheless, three ardent walkers took the train to meet the leaders at Brookwood station while another two arrived by car (an equally long journey).
The walk began with a stroll around Brookwood Cemetery, the largest in the UK, opened in 1854 as the London cemeteries filled. In 1884 the first Muslim cemetery in the UK was established there and the Military cemetery opened during the first world war and was extended during the Second World War. Until 1941 Brookwood had its own Necropolis Railway to transport coffins, mourners and officials to the site from the terminus at Waterloo.
We passed through the Turkish and Zoroastrian sections to the military section and onwards past sections for Americans, Italians, Polish and several others and then into the non-conformist section, pausing at the grave of Charles Bradlaugh, the first atheist to become an MP and the MP whose act in 1888 established the right to affirm the Parliamentary Oath rather than swearing the oath on a bible, as well as that of Alfred Bestall who illustrated Rupert Bear Stories in the Daily Express.

Crossing the road into the south side of the cemetery we took the route of the former railway track and passed the church where the bones of a Saxon king, Edward the Martyr lie before finding the grave of John Singer Sargent. Two walkers left there to retrace their steps and five of us continued through the cemetery meadows and out into the woods, down a lane and through a field and more woods to reach the lunch stop at Pirbright.



The walk after lunch took us over the pretty Pirbright Green and through the churchyard passing the grave of Stanley of ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ fame before following paths through fields and woodland to the Basingstoke Canal that we followed to arrive back for an early afternoon return train .
Linda. With thanks to Sigrid for photos.
Information about Brookwood Cemetery from The Brookwood Cemetery and The Brookwood Cemetery Society websites and the book ‘London’s Cemeteries’ by Darren Beach.