I went up to Highgate Cemetary recently while in London. I was also hoping to go to Brompton Cemetary, another of the “magnificent seven” of private cemetaries famously built during the Victorian era, but I didn’t have the time.
Highgate is by reputation the most interesting of them visually and I think historically. It’s also famous as the burial site of Karl Marx, which in turn has produced a nice cluster of other famous Marxists and leftists buried in the vicinity of his huge memorial.
Cemetaries often seem like “polite ruins”. E.g., to photograph actual abandoned and ruined buildings, however interesting they are visually, generally takes being where you are not supposed to be. Where there may be other people who are not supposed to be there either who are not there for photographs—I once came across abandoned houses in the woods well west of Swarthmore and started taking photographs before I realized that one of them had likely been turned into a facility for making meth, whereupon I went the other direction as quickly as I could manage.
Older graveyards have some of the aesthetic pleasures of ruins, though, often because there was a period between their initial construction and the present where they were somewhat moribund or less used. The last time I was at Highgate, almost forty years ago, it definitely felt less visited and less cared for. What was interesting this time was that there are some more recent burials from the last two decades where there’s been some marvelous creativity in the design of the headstones, in keeping with Highgate’s generally interesting visual aesthetic.
I’m a cremation person myself—or maybe the less environmentally destructive newer alternatives to cremation. But if you’re going to take up space in a burial ground and you can afford it, why not go with something visually interesting? Or an interesting memorial message.
I do love the way that Highgate is overgrown and such a jumble of graves of different eras, designs and states of repair. Next trip maybe I’ll get to another of the seven.