Highgate Cemetery

I've wanted to visit Highgate Cemetery for ages and when we were driving through Highgate the other day on the way to Islington, I mentioned my idea and thought it would be a good idea to go today, seeing as it was Halloween the next day!

I had a good look at the cemetery website before going and was a bit worried about parking as there wasn't any at all and then Keith mentioned that Tottenham were playing at home today, even though it was in the afternoon. Undeterred we went ahead, though, putting the postcode in Gladys and setting off at about 10am, making full use of the extra hour!

Again, we had a great journey down and were soon driving past the cemetery gates. Further up the hill were lots of parking spaces and it was free all day at weekends! We made our way back down the very steep hill (Highgate, as its name suggests, is one of the highest points in London at 375 feet above sea level) and joined the queue waiting for the next tour of the West Cemetery at 12pm. We were the last to get in as each tour only takes about 15 people.

Our tour guide was called Angie and she was obviously passionate about the cemetery and very knowledgable about the graves. She told us that the West Cemetery was opened in 1839 to alleviate the terrible lack of burial grounds in London at the time. She told us how bodies were piling up and there were four of five bodies buried in one grave, on top of each other! You can just imagine the smell and how horrible it must have been for people living then. Highgate was one of seven "garden cemeteries" opened to house the dead, all of them situated on the then outskirts of London which at the time were very rural.

The tour lasted about an hour and we were told stories about different graves and the people they contained. One of them was a man called George Wombwell who ran a Menagerie in Victorian times and made a lot of money exhibiting animals all over Great Britain when it was rare to see lions and tigers. He has a statue of his tame lion called Nero sitting on top of his grave:

The tour was very interesting and we saw the Egyptian Avenue with vaults on either side, the terraced catcombs and the Lebanon Circle, all of them family vaults that must have cost thousands. You can still be buried in Highgate Cemetery - there are 30 plots available in the West side - for about £20,000!

Entrance to the Egyptian Avenue

Looking back towards the entrance

One very sad story was about a man called Julius Beer who had a daughter, Ada, who died when she was 8 years old from smallpox. He had a huge and enormously ornate mausoleum built to house her coffin and a beautiful statue commisioned which shows her being taken up to heaven by an angel. Unbelievably the mausoleum was vandalised in the late 60s, early 70s but has since been restored to its former glory.

Not all of the inhabitants are Victorian, though. We saw the grave of Alexander Litvinenko who was buried in Highgate after dying in 2006 from being poisoned in a very famous Russian spy case.

He lived in Highgate and so wanted to be buried in the cemetery. He's buried 12 feet deep and in a lead lined coffin, though!

The West Cemetery is beautiful - very overgrown with lots of statues of angels, crosses and ivy-covered graves. I can only imagine how gorgeous it must be in winter when everything is covered in snow (think of the scene in the recent film of Phantom of the Opera when the main character is wandering around a graveyard!).

We all enjoyed the tour but I wished we were able to wander around on our own and take as many photos as we wanted. The tour guide kept telling us to all keep together so it was a bit annoying to be treated like naughty children if we dared to linger and take another photo of a statue. I know the graves have been vandalised in the past, but after paying £20 for the family to take the tour it would be nice if we were left alone for a while to wander about and just soak up the atmosphere as we're hardly likely to do any damage!

After the tour we took a walk through beautiful Waterlow Park in search of coffee and loos before heading back to the East Cemetery and paying another £6 to get in. They do ask for a voluntary donation for the children but as we'd already paid £20 we decided they'd had enough money out of us for one day!

The East Cemetery is much less atmpospheric than the West but it does have the grave of Karl Marx which is the main draw for people visiting.

And Jeremy Beadle!

There were also lots of Polish and Chinese people buried there with some beautifully ornate graves.

So, all in all, it was a fascinating day and I'm so glad I've been to see both cemeteries. They're definitely worth a visit and I'm already planning to go back when the winter snow is on the ground!

Highgate Cemetery