Enon Chapel

(John 3:23)[1] According to George Sanger's 1910 biography Seventy Years a Showman, Enon Chapel was licensed for burials in 1823, which continued until the minister died in early 1842.

The vaults beneath the meeting-house were turned into a burial place, which Walter Thornbury's 1887 Old and New London says "soon became filled with coffins up to the very rafters, so that there was only the wooden flooring between the living youth and the festering dead".

[2] In 1840 it was alleged to a House of Lords select committee[3] that the remains of "ten or twelve thousand" bodies had been concealed in a vault beneath Enon Chapel.

[4] On being denied access to the vault, Colonel Acton judged that from the "extreme unwillingness, and violence, indeed, of the keeper of Enon Chapel, that there must be a very great body of injurious matter concealed".

[citation needed] Writing in 1887, Walter Thornbury describes the excavation of the vault resulting in "a pyramid of human bones [...] exposed to view, separated from piles of coffin wood in various stages of decay", which would go on to fill "four up-heaved van loads".

c. 85),[citation needed] which closed burial grounds within metropolitan London and allowed the establishment of large cemeteries in the then surrounding countryside in the mid-19th century.