Highgate Cemetery, London’s best-known cemetery, renowned for its famous residents and for its bucolic beauty. on the slope of Highgate Hill. It was created in response to an urgent need for more burial grounds in the capital to relieve the pressure on the earlier ones, which, as a result of London’s rapidly growing population in the 19th century, were all too literally bulging with corpses. An Act of Parliament in 1836 provided for the establishment of cemeteries by the London Cemetery Company north, south, and east of the metropolis.
The company’s founder and architect, Stephen Geary—he is said to have designed London’s first gin palace—planned the cemetery at Highgate, where he was buried when he died in 1854. Garden designer David Ramsay was appointed landscape architect. The landscaping was beautifully done, with paths winding circuitously among the graves and monuments, Egyptian-style columns and obelisks, abundant trees, and stupendous catacombs. The cemetery was consecrated in 1839 and quickly became an attractive burial place for the wealthy. One of the most remarkable monuments is a copy of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, erected for Julius Beer, financier and proprietor of the The Observer newspaper, who died in 1880.
Highgate Cemetery was a tourist attraction from the start. The most famous monument is the brutish one to Karl Marx. Christina Rossetti and most of her family were buried at Highgate, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal, with the only copy of his poems to her. (He had her coffin opened in 1869 to retrieve them.) Other celebrated figures range from the philosopher Herbert Spencer to author George Eliot, scientist Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens’s wife, Catherine, musician Harry Thornton, the actor Sir Ralph Richardson, scientist and author Jacob Bronowski, and TV cook Philip Harben. There are wonderful views over London and monuments adorned with statues and figures, angels, broken violins, draped urns, and other symbols of mortality, as well as animals, including the prizefighter Tom Sayers’s pet dog.
Though the cemetery began to fall into disrepair in the 1930s, a decline that accelerated through the 1960s, restoration work began in the mid-1970s and continues today. The cemetery remains open for both burials and tourists.