Visited by Tombstone TourismAbney Park Cemetery
Stoke Newington, London
London's great nonconformist garden cemetery, first planted as an arboretum and now a woodland nature reserve.
Coming soon
The deeper story
A garden cemetery for a changing London
Opened in 1839 as the third of London's seven great private cemeteries, Highgate was laid out as a garden landscape on a steep slope below Highgate Village. Its surviving architecture includes the Egyptian Avenue, the Circle of Lebanon and terraced catacombs. After decades of decline it closed in 1975, and the local volunteers who formed the Friends of Highgate Cemetery that year have spent decades bringing it back, deliberately leaving much of the woodland wild.
The Bishop of London consecrated Highgate in May 1839. It was the third of the seven great private cemeteries built to relieve London's overcrowded churchyards. The London Cemetery Company, founded in 1836, chose a steep slope below Highgate Village. Its founder, the architect Stephen Geary, planned the site, James Bunstone Bunning became the company's architect, and the landscape gardener David Ramsay laid out the winding roads and gravel paths.
Geary's showpieces still define the West side. The Egyptian Avenue runs between high walls lined with tombs and opens into the Circle of Lebanon, a ring of vaults built around a cedar of Lebanon that is older than the cemetery itself. Above them, the Terrace Catacombs form a retaining wall below St Michael's church. Historic England describes them as the oldest surviving continuously asphalted structure in England.
Victorian Londoners came here to walk as well as to mourn, and the company bought more land across Swain's Lane in the 1850s. The East Cemetery roughly doubled the site. A tunnel under the lane, served by a hydraulic lift in the chapel, carried coffins between the two halves. Most of the Famous Graves in this guide, from Karl Marx to Douglas Adams, are on the East side.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the rise of cremation, labour shortages and a lack of money had left the grounds overgrown. The company's successor ran out of funds, vandalism followed, and the cemetery closed in 1975. That same year, local volunteers formed the Friends of Highgate Cemetery. They bought the freehold in 1981 and have spent decades repairing monuments and paths. Today a charitable trust runs Highgate as a working cemetery with no regular public funding, which is why visitors pay for entry.
Restoration has deliberately kept much of the woodland. Wildflower meadows and herbaceous planting now sit among the graves, and the site is recognised as a Local Nature Reserve. Give yourself time for both sides: the East is gentler and largely paved, while the West climbs steeply through the Victorian heart of the cemetery.
Highgate Cemetery, 1870s.
Engraving from Old and New London by Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford. British Library, public domain.
