Highgate Cemetery

Highgate was laid out by the London Cemetery Company, incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1836, as one of seven large modern burial grounds ringing central London, the group later known as the Magnificent Seven. The graveyards attached to individual churches in the inner city had long been unable to cope with the number of burials, and were seen both as a hazard to health and as an undignified way to treat the dead. The initial design was by Stephen Geary, an architect and entrepreneur who is himself buried here.

On 20 May 1839 the western cemetery was dedicated to St James by Charles James Blomfield, Bishop of London. Fifteen acres were consecrated for the use of the Church of England and two acres set aside for dissenters, and rights of burial were sold either for a limited period or in perpetuity. The first burial, six days later, was Elizabeth Jackson of Little Windmill Street, Soho.

Highgate became a fashionable place for burials and one much admired and visited, and the Victorian attitude to death and its presentation led to a wealth of Gothic tombs and buildings on the south-facing slope below the top of Highgate hill. In 1854 a further nineteen acres to the south east, across Swain's Lane, were bought to form an eastern extension, which opened in 1860.

On the west side the Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon are both Grade I listed buildings; the cedar of Lebanon that surmounted the Circle, some 280 years old, had to be cut down and replaced in August 2019. At the highest point, the Terrace Catacombs and the mausoleum of Julius Beer, owner of The Observer, are listed Grade II*. The Dissenter's Catacombs did not survive: declared unsafe in 1967, they were demolished, and three houses were subsequently built on the site.

Michael Faraday lies with his wife Sarah in the dissenters' section on the west side. The same side holds the anatomist Henry Gray, the poet Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, the novelist Radclyffe Hall, the prizefighter Tom Sayers (whose tomb is guarded by a stone image of his mastiff Lion, chief mourner at his funeral), and the singer George Michael.

The east side holds George Eliot, buried under the name Mary Ann Cross beside George Henry Lewes, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx, whose memorial was raised after his remains were reburied. The Marx tomb is itself Grade I listed for reasons of historical importance, and was the site of attempted bombings on 2 September 1965 and again in 1970. Also on this side are Claudia Jones, founder of the West Indian Gazette and the Notting Hill Carnival, and Farzad Bazoft, the journalist executed by Saddam Hussein's regime.

Fireman's Corner was erected on the east side in 1934 by the widows and orphans of members of the London Fire Brigade; 97 firemen are buried there, and the monument is cared for by the Brigade's welfare section. Across both sides lie 318 Commonwealth service personnel registered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 259 from the First World War and 59 from the Second, with those whose graves could not be marked by headstones listed on a screen wall near the Cross of Sacrifice.

The London Cemetery Company went bankrupt in 1960 and was absorbed by the United Cemetery Company. The Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, a charity set up in 1975, had acquired the freehold of both the east and west sides by 1981 and owns and maintains the cemetery today; the Highgate Cemetery Act 2022 gave the trust updated powers to manage the ground and to extinguish rights of burial. The cemetery was placed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens at Grade I in October 1987, and both sides are still used for burials, with roughly 170,000 people lying in some 53,000 graves.

The grounds have filled with trees, shrubbery and wildflowers, and shelter birds and small mammals including foxes; the cemetery's standing as a nature reserve is a de facto one. From the 1960s to the late 1980s it drew attention of another kind, appearing in the popular media for its supposed occult past as the alleged site of the "Highgate Vampire", and on film in Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) and Tales from the Crypt (1972).