Once Highgate Cemetery was the most landscaped and carefully managed burial ground in London--with sweeping paths designed to take you to the centre by circuitous routes; thousands of stolid middle class graves graced with angels, or urns, or obelisks; several stunningly original graves with lions, or dogs, or grand pianos; the Terrace Catacombs that gave unrivalled views of the City; the incredible Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon. Everything was once manicured, cared for a team of gardeners.
Nowadays, Highgate is a wood, with graves in it.
Highgate was the third of seven privately-owned cemeteries opened in the early years of Victoria's reign. Built on the old Ashurst estate on Swain's Lane, the first 17 acres, known now as the West Cemetery, was consecrated by the Bishop of London in May 1839. A few days later, Elizabeth Jackson of Golden Square was the first burial.
Highgate was designed and laid out by the most unexpected sort of architect and landscaper. Stephen Geary was more notable for designing gin palaces than serene green spaces to house the dead, but he joined the Board of the London Cemetery Company as architect of what was to become London's greatest and loveliest necropolis, working with gardeners and landscapers David Ramsey and James Bunning. Fittingly, he's buried in Highgate. His grave isn't easy to find, tucked away in the woodland near Comforts Corner. It's covered by bluebells every spring.
The West Cemetery straddles the north part of Highgate Hill, one long side following steep Swain's Lane as it rises to the Village. The West Cemetery has all the great architecture: the Catacombs, the Avenue, the Colonnade, the Chapels; but not many people who we'd think of nowadays as celebrities. With the exception of perhaps Christina Rossetti, a poet in her own right, the cemetery is mostly the last home of the families and relatives of famous people: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife Lizzie Siddal, for example, exhumed in 1869 so that Dante could recover the manuscript book of poems he buried with her; Charles Dickens estranged wife, his parents and sister.
The East Cemetery has Karl Marx, of course. And George Eliot (Mary Ann Cross, nee Evans). Neither of whom, in my opinion, very readable! But apart from some nice monuments, the East doesn't have very much else. All the romance, all the melodrama is bound up with the ivied architecture of the West Cemetery.
Highgate was privately owned (and still is!). That means that as land ran out and burials became less fashionable than cremations, there were no more profits. By the 1970s, it was so overgrown that volunteers hacked their way into it using machetes before they could start the work of reclamation.
It's still overgrown, still hauntingly beautiful. It's also safe from development and carefully managed again, but managed as a wooded site that's also the last resting place of more than 100,000 people.
Go and see it. You won't regret it.