Highgate Hill and West "Old" Cemetery

To finish off my last Sunday in London, I think I hit the jackpot. In 1979-1980, I lived in Muswell Hill, and Highgate was a favorite walk. It was wierd to come back after 30 years away, and see things I recognized, such as the Woodman Pub, near the Tube station and the Highgate School, founded 1565. Strangest of all was what I didn't remember. I definitely have a photo of Karl Marx's tomb from those days, but Marx is buried in the East Cemetery. I signed up for the 4PM tour of the older West cemetery (£7 with a volunteer from Friends of Highgate Cemetery). I just don't remember this place at all. Its history holds a clue. Founded in 1839, it had fallen into total ruin by 1975, when the owners went bankrupt. It must have been still overrun with sycamores and vines, and locked up behind its huge and spooky iron gates at the time I walked past. The charity reopened the cemetery in the early 1980s, and what a place it is. Lots of huge vaults and eerie statues, overrun with ivy and tall grass. It's not being renewed, rather, the charity concentrates on maintaining the cemetery, and provides a guided tour of notable tombs, topped off with a visit to Egyptian Avenue, which you enter via "The Gateway to the City of the Dead". If that's not enough, you can visit the Terrace Catacombs, and peer into the gloom at the leadlined coffins. The Mausoleum of Julius Beer is gloriously ostentatious, and now a listed monument, very different from the story the guide tells of when he first visited the place in the pre-charity days. The glass in the building had been broken, and apparently it stank of guano, because of decades of pigeons roosting, and pooping, inside. Actually all the catacombs had been vandalized in the early 1970s, and the grave smashing and corpse dumping apparently culminated in the sensational case of a member of the British Occult Society being arrested in the cemetery. A stake and a crucifix are involved. Think I'm making this up? Check this. I'm sure the whole case is still hotly contested, but it certainly is a ripping tale.

I find the Victorians' cult of death very curious, and the funerary monuments are among the best I've ever seen. Likely I'm not alone in this. A woman on the tour asked me if I was here "because of the book." Huh? What book? Well, apparently the latest book by the person who wrote The Time Traveler's Wife relates to this cemetery. I think I read elsewhere that Bram Stoker's Dracula is inspired by this place. Not hard to believe at all.