Across Swain's Lane
If the western cemetery is Highgate's theatre — its Egyptian Avenue a proscenium arch, its Circle of Lebanon a stage set — then the eastern cemetery is its library: more democratic, less performative, arranged not for spectacle but for the steady accumulation of stories. The eastern ground lies across Swain's Lane from its older sibling, occupying a roughly equal acreage of the same Highgate hillside but configured in an entirely different manner. Where the west is architectural and enclosed, designed around a sequence of dramatic set pieces, the east is open and landscaped, its paths winding through a parkland of mature trees and rising ground that feels more like a neglected country estate than a metropolitan burial ground. It was opened in 1860, two decades after the western cemetery, and it was conceived from the start as a more practical, less theatrical space — a place where the growing middle class could be buried with dignity if not with quite the same grandeur that the western ground's premium plots demanded.
The entrance to the eastern cemetery is modest by comparison with the Tudor-Gothic gateway opposite. A pair of iron gates set in a low wall opens onto a broad path that curves gently uphill between borders of Victorian headstones, their inscriptions weathered to varying degrees of legibility. The atmosphere here is different from the first step. The western cemetery's enclosing vegetation creates an almost subterranean feeling, a sense of being underground even when standing in the open air, but the eastern ground is sunlit and breezy, its mature limes and chestnuts casting dappled shade across paths wide enough for two to walk abreast. There is a municipal quality to the landscaping — the paths are better maintained, the grass more regularly cut — that reflects the cemetery's more accessible status. The eastern ground is open to unguided visitors, and the result is a different kind of encounter: less curated, more personal, shaped by the visitor's own curiosity rather than a guide's narrative.
The 1860 expansion was driven by simple commercial necessity. The western cemetery, for all its magnificence, was filling up. The London Cemetery Company had underestimated the demand for burial space — or perhaps overestimated the amount of hillside they could terrace into vaults — and by the late 1850s, the pressure to expand was acute. The land across Swain's Lane was acquired, and a new cemetery was laid out in a style that reflected both the changing tastes of the period and the practical need to accommodate more burials per acre. The elaborate catacombs and sunken circles of the west gave way to conventional grave plots arranged in rows, with a central chapel — since demolished — providing the only significant architectural punctuation. The eastern cemetery was, in every sense, more ordinary than its predecessor. But ordinariness, in a cemetery, has its own eloquence.
The Landscape and Its Character
The eastern cemetery's character is defined less by its architecture than by its trees. The London Cemetery Company planted extensively when the ground was laid out, and the trees they chose — London planes, English oaks, limes, horse chestnuts, and a scattering of ornamental specimens including several magnificent copper beeches — have matured into a canopy that gives the cemetery the feel of a well-established arboretum. Walking the eastern ground on an autumn afternoon, when the chestnuts are dropping their fruit and the copper beeches are turning the colour of old port, is one of those experiences that reminds you why the Victorians believed cemeteries could serve as public parks. The dead lie beneath a landscape of genuine beauty, and the living who come to visit them find themselves in a space that offers something more than grief.
The topography of the eastern ground mirrors the western in its essential feature — a hillside rising steeply from Swain's Lane — but the layout exploits it differently. Instead of the dramatic terracing of the west, the eastern cemetery's paths follow the natural contours of the slope in long, gentle curves, creating a promenade that ascends gradually through different zones of burial. The lower slopes, nearest to Swain's Lane, contain the oldest graves, their headstones leaning at angles that speak of a century and a half of soil movement and root growth. Higher up, the graves become more recent, the stones more upright, the inscriptions more legible, until near the summit one finds plots still available for new burials — a reminder that Highgate Cemetery, unlike many of its contemporaries, remains an active burial ground.
The contrast between the two halves of Highgate Cemetery is one of the things that makes the place so fascinating. The western ground represents the romantic, theatrical strand of Victorian funerary culture — death as spectacle, burial as architectural statement — while the eastern ground represents the practical, democratic strand: death as a universal experience, burial as a matter of decency and remembrance. Both strands were present throughout the Victorian period, and both have their own kind of beauty, but it is the eastern cemetery that feels, to the modern visitor, more immediately accessible. The western ground requires a guide and a willingness to enter a world of unfamiliar symbols and forgotten social codes. The eastern ground requires only the ability to read a headstone and the willingness to be moved by what it says.
Karl Marx and the Politics of Burial
The most visited grave in the eastern cemetery — and almost certainly the most visited grave in any British cemetery — is that of Karl Marx, who was buried here on 17 March 1883, three days after his death at his home in Kentish Town. The funeral was a modest affair. Eleven people attended the graveside, and Friedrich Engels delivered a eulogy that predicted, with characteristic confidence, that Marx's name would "endure through the ages." The grave itself was equally modest: a simple plot in an unremarkable row, marked by a headstone of conventional design. Marx had died in relative obscurity, his revolutionary theories not yet tested by the upheavals of the twentieth century, and his burial reflected the circumstances of his life in London — decades of poverty, illness, and scholarly labour conducted in the reading room of the British Museum and the cramped rooms of rented houses in Soho, Kentish Town, and Primrose Hill.
The transformation of Marx's grave from a modest plot to a monumental shrine is a story that belongs to the Cold War rather than to the Victorian cemetery. In 1954, the Communist Party of Great Britain commissioned the sculptor Laurence Bradshaw to create a new memorial, and the result — a massive bronze bust of Marx mounted on a granite plinth, inscribed with the famous injunction "Workers of All Lands Unite" — was unveiled in 1956. The bust dominates the upper slopes of the eastern cemetery, visible from considerable distances, and its scale and assertiveness are deliberately at odds with the quiet domesticity of the surrounding graves. It is, depending on one's political sympathies, either a fitting tribute to one of history's most influential thinkers or an act of aesthetic vandalism in a landscape designed for quiet contemplation. Either way, it draws visitors from around the world — tourists, scholars, politicians, and pilgrims — in numbers that no other grave in Highgate can match.
The politics of the Marx grave have been a source of controversy since the memorial was erected. The bust has been vandalised repeatedly, attacked with hammers, splashed with paint, and on at least two occasions targeted with explosive devices. These attacks have come from both ends of the political spectrum — from anti-communists who regard Marx as the architect of twentieth-century tyranny and from anarchists who object to the memorialisation of any authority figure. The Friends of Highgate Cemetery, who now manage the site, have had to balance the grave's status as a place of political pilgrimage against the needs of a functioning cemetery where families come to mourn their dead. The decision to charge admission to the eastern cemetery — controversial when it was introduced — was driven in part by the costs of managing the Marx-related visitor traffic and the security requirements that the grave's fame imposes.
George Eliot and the Literary Dead
Marx is the eastern cemetery's most famous resident, but he is far from its only distinguished one. George Eliot — Mary Ann Evans — was buried here in 1880, three years before Marx, in a plot that reflects the complicated social politics of her life. Eliot had lived for over two decades with the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes in a relationship that, because Lewes was unable to divorce his legal wife, was regarded by respectable Victorian society as scandalous. When Lewes died in 1878, Eliot was devastated, and when she herself died just two years later, the question of where she should be buried became a matter of public debate. Westminster Abbey was proposed and rejected — the Dean was unwilling to admit a woman who had lived openly in an irregular union — and Highgate became the compromise: prestigious enough to honour England's greatest living novelist, but not so prestigious as to imply the Church's endorsement of her domestic arrangements.
Eliot's grave is a handsome obelisk in red granite, inscribed with both her pen name and her legal name, and it occupies a prominent position near the main path. It is less visited than Marx's grave but arguably more moving — a monument to a woman whose novels explored, with unprecedented psychological depth, the moral complexities of provincial English life, and whose own life was itself a study in the tension between personal conviction and social convention. Flowers are often left on the grave, usually by literary pilgrims who have made the journey from the reading of Middlemarch to the hillside where its author lies, and the modest obelisk seems somehow more appropriate to Eliot's temperament than any grander monument would have been.
The eastern cemetery's literary connections extend well beyond Eliot. The philosopher Herbert Spencer is buried here, as is the novelist Mrs Henry Wood, author of the sensational East Lynne, and the poet Christina Rossetti, whose grave near the boundary wall is marked by a simple cross that belies the complexity and passion of her verse. These literary burials were not accidental. Highgate's prestige attracted writers and thinkers as much as it attracted the commercial wealthy, and the eastern ground in particular — less expensive than the western, but still carrying the Highgate name — became a natural resting place for the intellectual upper-middle class of Victorian and Edwardian London.
Douglas Adams and Modern Burials
The most unexpected grave in the eastern cemetery may be that of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, who died suddenly in 2001 at the age of forty-nine and was buried at Highgate in a ceremony that combined genuine grief with the irreverent humour for which he was famous. Adams's grave is in the newer section of the eastern cemetery, near the top of the hill, and it has become a place of pilgrimage for a very different kind of visitor than the Marxist scholars and literary tourists who frequent the lower slopes. Fans leave pens, towels, and potted plants on the grave — the pens because Adams was famously reluctant to write, the towels in reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide's most essential piece of advice, and the plants for reasons that presumably made sense at the time.
Adams's presence at Highgate is a reminder that the cemetery remains a living institution, still accepting new burials, still adding to the layers of history that make the place so rich. The newer graves near the summit occupy plots that would have seemed impossibly remote when the cemetery was laid out in 1860 but that now, with the lower slopes full, represent the last available space on the hillside. They are conventional in form — headstones in granite or marble, inscribed with the standard formulas of modern bereavement — but their presence alongside the Victorian and Edwardian monuments creates a palimpsest of funerary fashions that is itself a kind of social history. The elaborate carved angels and broken columns of the nineteenth century give way to the plainer stones of the twentieth, and those in turn to the sleek, minimal designs of the twenty-first, each generation's idea of an appropriate memorial shaped by its own relationship with death and display.
Other notable modern burials include the artist Patrick Caulfield, the journalist Paul Foot, the publisher Malcolm Muggeridge, and the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, whose grave in the eastern cemetery acquired a grim resonance after the circumstances of his poisoning became public knowledge. Each of these burials adds another layer to the cemetery's ongoing story, another name to the roll of those who chose — or whose families chose for them — to lie on this particular Highgate hillside rather than any of the countless other places where the London dead might rest. The reasons are various — proximity to a family home, the prestige of the Highgate name, a feeling of connection with the distinguished dead already interred — but the cumulative effect is of a community of the dead that mirrors, in its diversity and its hierarchies, the community of the living above.
The Landscape of Memory
Walking the eastern cemetery in the late afternoon, when the shadows lengthen across the paths and the last visitors are making their way back to Swain's Lane, one becomes aware of the landscape's layered quality — the sense that every square foot of this hillside contains multiple stories, multiple lives, multiple griefs compressed into the same piece of earth. The headstones crowd together with an intimacy that the living might find uncomfortable, their inscriptions testifying to the full range of human experience: infants dead at weeks, matriarchs at ninety, soldiers killed in wars they did not choose, artists who burned too bright to last. The formulaic language of bereavement — "beloved wife," "devoted father," "fell asleep" — takes on a cumulative power when repeated across thousands of stones, each formula concealing a particular, unrepeatable loss.
The eastern cemetery's ecology, like the western ground's, has been profoundly shaped by decades of reduced maintenance. The trees have grown into magnificent specimens precisely because no one has been pruning them to a municipal standard, and the understorey of shrubs, wildflowers, and ferns that fills the spaces between graves supports a wildlife population that includes foxes, hedgehogs, several species of bat, and a breeding population of tawny owls whose calls at dusk add another layer of atmosphere to an already atmospheric place. The Friends of Highgate Cemetery have adopted a conservation approach that recognises the ecological value of this managed neglect, maintaining paths and sightlines while allowing the vegetation to develop in ways that a Victorian park superintendent would have found appalling but that a modern ecologist recognises as extraordinarily valuable.
The relationship between the two halves of Highgate Cemetery — the theatrical west and the democratic east, separated by nothing more than the width of Swain's Lane — is one of the things that makes the whole complex so compelling. Together, they span the full range of Victorian attitudes to death, from the pharaonic grandeur of the Egyptian Avenue to the quiet domesticity of a family headstone in the eastern ground's middle slopes. They tell a story about class, about money, about the desire to be remembered and the inevitable fading of memory, and they tell it in a language of stone and earth and vegetation that transcends the particular circumstances of any individual burial. To walk both halves in a single afternoon — the guided tour of the west in the morning, a solitary ramble through the east after lunch — is to experience one of the most complete meditations on mortality that any city in the world has to offer.
A Living Cemetery in a Changing City
Highgate Cemetery's eastern ground faces challenges that its Victorian founders could not have anticipated. The cost of maintaining a Grade I listed landscape in the centre of one of the world's most expensive cities is considerable, and the income from burials and visitor fees, while substantial, does not always cover the expenses of conservation, security, and staffing. The Friends of Highgate Cemetery have supplemented their income with grants, donations, and commercial partnerships, but the financial model remains precarious, dependent on the continuing willingness of volunteers to give their time and the continuing interest of visitors in a place whose attractions are, by definition, sombre.
The eastern cemetery has also had to adapt to changing patterns of burial. Cremation, which was virtually unknown when the cemetery was founded, now accounts for the majority of disposals, and the Friends have responded by creating areas for the interment of ashes alongside the traditional grave plots. These newer areas lack the Victorian solidity of the older sections — the memorials are smaller, the plantings more contemporary — but they serve the same essential function: providing a place where the living can come to be near their dead, to lay flowers, to sit on a bench and remember. The eastern cemetery may not have the architectural drama of its western counterpart, but it has something equally valuable: the continuity of use that transforms a burial ground from a historical curiosity into a living institution.
There is a bench near the top of the eastern cemetery, positioned where the ground levels out and the view opens across the rooftops of north London towards the hills of Hertfordshire, that may be the finest place in Highgate to sit and think about nothing in particular. Below, the headstones descend the slope in their irregular rows, the names and dates blurring into a general pattern of grey and white against green. Swain's Lane is invisible from this height, and the traffic on Highgate Hill is reduced to a distant murmur. The only sounds are birdsong and the wind in the chestnuts and the occasional crunch of gravel as another visitor makes their way up the path. It is a place of extraordinary peace, and it has been a place of peace for a hundred and sixty years, and if the Friends of Highgate Cemetery have their way — and there is every reason to hope they will — it will be a place of peace for a hundred and sixty more.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*