14 CONTEXT 180 : JUNE 2024 IAN DUNGAVELL Life and death at Highgate Cemetery Successfully managing what is perhaps the most famous cemetery in England depends on balancing burials and tourism, heritage and nature, and the past and the future. Highgate Cemetery, opened in 1839, is perhaps the most famous cemetery in England and one of the world’s finest examples of the picturesque garden cemetery. From its earliest days visitors were attracted by its spectacular hillside setting and unforgettable funerary architecture. A guidebook was published only five years after it opened, pointing out interesting monuments, and no doubt prompting visitors to think about where they might end up when death came for them too. The London Cemetery Company, the private, profit-making enterprise which set it up, would be more than happy, for a fee, to provide space in their beautiful sepulchral garden. From visitor accounts we know that the rich aesthetic interest came not only from reading epitaphs and looking at sculpture but also from their journey through the landscape: the experience of strolling along the serpentine paths superimposed on a rolling landscape, breathing in the chill air of the Egyptian Avenue. Visitors experienced the crunch of their footsteps on the gravel path, intensified by the darkness, before emerging, to make their way up to the great terrace, past the Lebanon Circle to just beneath St Michael’s Church. From there could be had one of the finest views of London. Looking over the dead resting peacefully at their feet, the visitor could see a growing mass of houses, towers, spires, domes and crowds of shipping on the Thames, all spread out in front of the Surrey hills in the distance. Much more than just a view, the contrast between the city of the dead and the city of the living was a poignant reminder of where one’s future lay. Although graves were sold in perpetuity, nobody had really planned for what would happen when the cemetery filled up. In the 1960s, as it became unprofitable to run, the asset-strippers The entrance to the Egyptian Avenue (Photo: Michael Eleftheriades)
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