A Private Tour of Highgate West Cemetery «

A Private Tour of Highgate West Cemetery

Saturday 22nd September 2018

Ed Jasper, the bed linen expert, arranged a private tour. They were very strict that George Michael’s last resting place would not be revealed, no matter how much money was offered. In fact a private tour is the only way of viewing this part of the cemetery. Karl Marx is buried in the East Cemetery, where one may roam at ease, for a fee.

We stopped at a tremendous military grave. The guide said, ‘Guess what the uprights forming the surrounding railing are?’ Quick as a flash, Ed Jasper said, ‘They’re upside-down canons, but what if a porn star was buried here….’ i.e. Would they be penetrative devices of an extreme nature? The guide was turned to a heap of ash but bore up. Highgate West Cemetery is fabulously gloomy and over-grown. Not how it would have been in its day. Vegetation has sprung up wildly since. So now it’s a dank wood with graves, no sense of a park like Brompton where I was for the launch with Tristram Hunt and Royston King. The Victorians did Death is every known style, except, it would seem, the Christian. Astonishing lack of Crosses. The favourite style is Egyptian, or some idea of Egyptian. There’s the Egyptian Avenue, a kind of creepy semi-underground grotto and the Circle of Lebanon where the tombs have front doors in the Egyptian style. Radclyffe Hall is installed in one, with a defiant message from Una outside: ‘… And if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. Una.’

But beneath all this gloomy grandeur really are buried here a load of chancers, upstarts, illegal prize fighters and horse-slaughtering moguls who rose from the seething streets of Islington, Hoxton, Shoreditch and King’s Cross to splendid entombment at Highgate. What a picture of London life in the mid-19th century zings forth from these dour groves to this day!