It was probably the most interesting thing I did when I visited London, visiting this venerable old cemetery. As a cemetery tourist I have seen a lot of them, the good, the bad, and the awful, mostly in Chicago but also in other parts of the US.
Perhaps the worst locations for a cemetery were the ones relocated from a runway at O'Hare International Airport, hemmed in by a network of industrial warehouses, constantly arriving and departing aircraft, or the one I remember that is located at the intersection of two freeways and under the approach flight path of the same airport. Of course when the cemeteries were laid out the century or so previous, no one anticipated that they would be surrounded by freeways, burger joints, florists, and monument companies. The intention was a peaceful contemplative location far from the cares of life.
The best cemeteries have been the old ones laid out in a pastoral setting with great trees and a forest of upright stones and statuary that must be a string trimmer's paradise, as on any sunny weekday, hordes of workers in tee shirts and hearing protectors work away at the lawns, removing any plastic flowers, wind chimes, and sodden teddy bears that they find.
Like many old cemeteries, Highgate is located near the crest of a high hill. To get there from central London, I took the North line from Goodge Street station in Fitzrovia. It took a while to get there from central London. After studying the maps in the A-Z Atlas of London I decided to get off at Archway station, which serves a scruffy looking part of North London but as you walk up the hill things get progressively more prosperous.
At the station, there was Middlesex University ( one of its campuses soon to close) across the street and public houses and grim looking public buildings that look like they were slapped together cheaply in the 1950s. Then as I worked my way laterally along Magdala Avenue alongside Whittington Hospital, the Raydon Road and the right uphill along Swain's Lane until I saw the lower reaches of Highgate Cemetery.
The cemetery is divided into an east and a west section. The west section is closed except for guided tours. It had experienced some neglect over the years and is only recently has it undertaken restoration work. Because of the occasional subsidence of graves it isn't safe to allow people to wander unattended through the cemetery, (or at least that was the explanation offered). There were graves surrounded with caution tape, which I guess, had suffered from disrepair. There had obviously been vandalism too.
Most of the west cemetery is very much overgrown with weeds and brush and vines clinging to the faces of graves, even. At night the place is full of foxes and other wildlife, and the tour guide said you can hear the foxes barking or screaming like lost children at night. There are various efforts of course at restoration. Our tour group visited various parts of the catacombs, which were a magnificent below ground ring of funeral chambers surrounding the summit of a hill crowned by a large old tree.
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Alexander Litvinenko
Alexander Litvinenko
Of course a number of famous people along with the merely rich have been buried there in the east cemetery even if some of them now seemed lost in obscurity. An exception however must have been made in the case of Alexander Litivinenko, a Russian emigre and dissident who was murdered in a most ghoulish matter by ingesting radioactive material placed in his drink. He died an agonizing death from radiation poisoning a week or two later. They still don't know exactly who did it but the suspicion is that Russian agents had a role in it. It has not been the first time that suspicious murders of refugees from Eastern Europe have taken place in London or Washington, of course. A Bulgarian who defected from the then Communist Bulgaria was killed by a ricin injection from the end of a specially modified umbrella as he was walking across one of the bridges over the Thames. And I was reading somewhere just the other day of another Russian emigre who was unaccountably found dead at his home near London.
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Unlike the west cemetery, which is reserved mainly for persons adhering to the Church of England, others such as dissenters, Methodists and atheists can be laid to rest in the east cemetery, which is still a working cemetery, although even it seems overgrown in many places. The most famous atheist buried there is unquestionably Karl Marx, the German philosopher who formulated the basis for modern communism and who died in exile in London in 1883.
He was originally buried in a much more obscure part of the cemetery, off the main paved path that runs down and around the cemetery, however in 1950 the British Communist Party, moved his remains and marker and erected the memorial where he now rests, with a massive sculpture of his likeness and incorporating the simple stone that originally was his grave marker.
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More to my liking, personally was another atheist, Douglas Adams, who died of a massive heart attack at the rather early age of 49.* Adams was the author of the "Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy" which started out as a radio comedy, spawned a TV series, and morphed into a series of books and at least one feature film. He also was a contributor to the old Doctor Who sci-fi series that continues to this day. His grave is a very simple one with his name, the years of his birth and death and the word "Writer". Next to his grave at the time I was looking at it was a flower pot full of pens and pencils. I expect that writing instruments are a more appropriate artifact to leave at a writer's grave than flowers, figurines, pebbles, candy bars or cans of beer.
This is the first part of the first episode of his most famous series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMoi-nDd6cQ
*Anyone who dies at an age younger than I am now, died young.
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Malcolm McLaren
Malcolm McLaren
A short ways down is the grave of rock and roll impresario Malcolm McLaren, who, among other things, was the manager for Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. This was the era of punk rock, and their most famous song was "God Save The Queen" which was not exactly a paeon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z2M_hpoPwk
His grave seems to owe something to the Warner Brothers Logo.
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Sir Ralph Richardson (1902-1983) was a famous British actor who was one of the founding members of the Old Vic Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He appeared in many films as well, including "Doctor Zhivago", "The Heiress", "Richard III", "Our Man in Havana", "Long Day's Journey into Night", "Oh! What a Lovely War", "Jesus of Nazareth", and "Time Bandits."
He appeared on the TV program "What's my Line" back in the 1960s here:
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Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005) was a painter. While most graves euphemistically speak of the departed as "asleep" or "with Jesus", Caulfield's marker was rather original in design and in the message: DEAD, but much loved.
One of his best known works was "After Lunch" (1975) which I saw a few days later at the Tate Britain.
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(1950-2011)
I can't say I knew this person or knew of him, but the memorial was unique and affecting. I did briefly meet his wife who was tending the flowers near his grave. If I had known the widow of the man interred was standing right there I would politely have wandered off and not taken any pictures, leaving her alone with her grief, but I didn't notice her until I had taken my pictures. Afterwards I googled the deceased and discovered that he was an advertising executive, and an important strategist for the Labour Party during the Thatcher and Blair years.
When he was dying of cancer, Gould wrote a book on facing death "When I die: Lessons from the Death Zone" and made a short film .
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1791- 1867
He was kind of a self-made scientist having little formal education, who nevertheless made many important discoveries in electrochemistry and electromagnetism during a time when science was progressing from gentleman's hobby to an industrial enterprise. A consummate experimentalist.
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The Sleeping Lion, the Starbucks Girl, and the Grieving Dog
Apart from the famous people interred there, every cemetery can be looked upon as a museum of grief and hopes about the afterlife. A man who was referred to as a "menagerist" had a sculpture of a lion sleeping on his tomb.
Lions are popular symbols in British cemeteries, but this man actually owned a few, along with other animals, and made his living exhibiting them to the public.
Female figures of mourning and angels have also long been popular as grave adornments. I call this one the "Starbucks Girl" because she reminds me of the trademark of the Starbucks Coffee
whose shops are found worldwide.
Most old cemeteries have its share of grieving angels and maidens and here are a couple from Highgate:
In the latter picture notice the symbolism of the inverted torch, which is a common symbol of death in British as well as American cemeteries.
Finally while living dogs are frequently unwelcome in cemeteries for obvious reasons, the main reason of which is that they like to mark their territory against every upright object and are unmindful of the appropriateness of where they deposit their waste. However stone dogs as figures of mourning are still popular, and who knows? Some of them may also be interred along with their owners.
The End
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