Highgate Cemetery - A Grade 1 Listed Cemetery

Back in 1987 Highgate Cemetery was first included on the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest. In 2009 it has been upgraded to Grade 1.

English Heritage gives their reasons for the listing as follows:

• The cemetery is an early and important example of an early Victorian commercial cemetery (1839) laid out in the garden style.
• The site is the third metropolitan cemetery.
• The cemetery contains an outstanding collection of funerary monuments which reflect the social and political history of Victorian London.
• The cemetery contains an outstanding collection of structures designed by Stephen Geary and, from 1839, by James Bunstone Bunning, both of whom were noted cemetery designers.
• The cemetery layout is complex and survives substantially intact.

Full details can be found on the English Heritage website - www.english-heritage.org.uk

Whereas this is good reason to celebrate, and continue the valuable work of upkeep and improvement, at the same time English Heritage renewed the inclusion of the Cemetery in their Heritage At Risk Register, citing its general condition as unsatisfactory, its vulnerability as high, and its trend as deteriorating.

Thus there is still so much to do, and the start earlier in the year of the implementation of a Landscape Management Plan for the Western Cemetery is only the beginning.