A HISTORY OF HIGHGATE CEMETERY

In the early decades of the nineteenth century London was facing a major crisis.  Inadequate burial space along with a high mortality rate resulted in a serious problem - not enough room for the dead.  Graveyards and burial grounds were crammed in between shops, houses and taverns, wherever there was space.  In really bad situations undertakers dressed as clergy performed unauthorized and illegal burials.  Bodies were wrapped in cheap material and buried amongst other human remains in graves just a few feet deep. Quicklime was often thrown over the body to help speed decomposition, so that within a few months the grave could be used again. The smell from these disease-ridden burial places was terrible. They were overcrowded, uncared for and neglected.

The cause of this situation was that in the early 1800s London had a population of just one million people.  In the following years the population had increased rapidly and the death rate along with it. Very little new burial space had been put aside to cater for the growing numbers and by the early 1830s the authorities were stating that for public health reasons something had to be done.

Parliament passed a statute to the effect that seven new private cemeteries should be opened in the countryside around the capital for the burial of London’s dead.  These cemeteries were Kensal Green 1833, West Norwood 1836, Highgate 1839, Abney Park 1840, Brompton 1840, Nunhead 1840 and Tower Hamlets 1841.

In 1836 an Act of Parliament was passed creating The London Cemetery Company. Stephen Geary, an architect and the company’s founder, appointed James Bunstone Bunning as surveyor and David Ramsey, renowned garden designer as the landscape architect.  A head office was opened at 22 Moorgate Street, London.

The sum of £3,500 was paid for seventeen acres of land that had been the grounds of the Ashurst Estate, descending the steep hillside from Highgate Village. Over the next three years the cemetery was landscaped to brilliant effect by Ramsey with exotic formal planting, complimented by the stunning and unique architecture of both Geary and Bunning.  It was this combination that was to secure Highgate as the capital’s principal cemetery.

On Monday 20 May 1839 The London Cemetery at Highgate was dedicated to St James by the Right Reverend Charles James Blomfield, Lord Bishop of London. Fifteen acres were consecrated for the use of members of the Church of England and two acres set aside for dissenters (people who were not Church of England).  Rights of burial were granted for either a limited period or in perpetuity.  The first burial, on 26 May 1839, was Elizabeth Jackson aged thirty-six, of Little Windmill Street, Soho.

The unparalleled elevation overlooking London, rising to 375’ above sea level at its highest point, along with its unique architecture, meant that the wealthy would be encouraged to invest. The millionaire newspaper owner Julius Beer, was one such investor who built the most cemetery’s impressive monument to his eight year old daughter Ada.

Two chapels, Church of England and Dissenters, were housed within one building, built in the Tudor style, topped with wooden turrets and a central bell tower. Beneath the bell-tower remains an archway linking the two conflicting religious ideals of each denomination and denoting the lack of partiality of the London Cemetery Company. The archway also gave an imposing entry to the Cemetery.

In the heart of the grounds was created the Egyptian Avenue, an eccentric structure consisting of sixteen vaults on either side of a broad passageway, entered via a great arch. These vaults were fitted with shelves for twelve coffins and were each purchased by individual families for their sole use. This avenue then lead to the Circle of Lebanon which was built in the same style and consisted of twenty vaults on the inner circle with a further sixteen added in the 1870s, built in the classical style which had then returned to fashion. The Circle was created by earth being excavated around an ancient Cedar of Lebanon, a legacy of the Ashurst Estate and was used to great visual effect by the cemetery’s designers.  Above this, a separate gothic styled catacomb, named the Terrace Catacombs due to its position on the site of the earlier terrace of Ashurst House, was completed in 1842. This was built with an impressive eighty yard frontage and room for a total of eight hundred and twenty-five people in fifty-five vaults of fifteeen loculi each, each loculus being sold individually to house one coffin. These were typical of the fashion for above ground burial.

Highgate attracted a varied clientele and over the next twenty years became one of the capital’s most fashionable cemeteries.  In 1854 the London Cemetery Company was so profitable that the cemetery was extended by a further twenty acres on the other side of its Swain's Lane site. This new ground, now known as the East Cemetery, was opened in 1856.  A tunnel beneath Swain’s Lane connected the new ground with the Church of England chapel in the older (West) side.  With the aid of a hydraulic lift, coffins would descend into the tunnel and remain on cemetery ground for their passage to the other half of the cemetery.

The first burial in the new ground took place on 12th June 1860, with the burial of Mary-Anne Webster, the sixteen year old daughter of a local baker. By that point there were over 10,400 graves within the older part of the cemetery.  During a short period of this decade an average of thirty burials a day took place, including the burial in the West Cemetery of Tom Sayers, the famous bare-knuckled prize-fighter who to this day boasts the largest funeral in the history of the cemetery with press reports of over ten-thousand mourners in attendance, including Lion, his faithful dog who was chief mourner.

Unarguably the most famous interment in Highgate Cemetery is in the East Cemetery and is that of the philosopher Karl Marx who died in 1883 and his grave is believed now to be amongst the most visited in London.

By the turn of the century, the desire for elaborate funerals was waning and families began to choose less ostentatious memorials than in previous decades.  At the outbreak of the Great War, many of the cemetery’s forty or so gardeners and grounds-men were called up to fight. Despite this diminished workforce, the grounds continued to be kept in immaculate order, held under the strict authority of the superintendent.

Although some wealthy families continued to purchase select Rights of Burial into the 1930s, Highgate Cemetery was passing into a long terminal decline with less expensive and more common graves being the main options. Increasingly, greater numbers of graves were abandoned as families died out and maintenance became minimal.  In 1960 the London Cemetery Company, facing bankruptcy, was absorbed into the larger United Cemetery Company which struggled to keep the cemetery afloat until funds ran out in 1975 and the gates were closed.

In the same year, The Friends of Highgate Cemetery was formed to save the cemetery for grave owners, public benefit and future generations.

Over the last thirty-six years restoration and conservation work has been carried out on the Egyptian Avenue, Circle of Lebanon and the Terrace Catacombs which, along with over seventy other monuments, have now been listed by English Heritage with over double that number having had expert attention and maintenance (photos of which can be seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZMDcKRV1Hs). During 2011, restoration to the interior of the Chapel has begun and will be finished in early 2012.  Both sides of the cemetery remain open as active burial grounds with interments taking place on a weekly basis and the hard work continues…