05/30/2026
I love cemeteries.
By the 1830s, London's churchyards were full - catastrophically, dangerously full, with bodies buried on top of bodies and the whole situation becoming a genuine public health crisis. The solution was the garden cemetery, built outside the city, landscaped and beautiful, with walking paths and benches and enough space between the graves that families could bring a picnic and spend an afternoon communing with their dead. That was the actual intention. Grief as a Sunday outing.
Highgate opened in 1839 and it is one of the best of them. The architecture can't quite make up its mind between Romanticism and Neoclassicism, which makes it so interesting to wander — you turn a corner and the mood changes. It was also, being Victorian, deeply competitive. The monuments were meant to last forever and to make sure everyone knew exactly how important (read "rich") you were.
Then the First World War happened, and the gardening stopped. What grew back over the next century is something the Victorians never planned for and would probably have hated — ivy eating the mausoleums, ferns pushing through the paths, nature making its slow push back. George Wombwell, who ran the most famous traveling menagerie in Victorian England and had a lion carved above his grave to make sure no one forgot it, has been half swallowed by the forest.
I took these photos during a 2021 guided tour, which I recommend. I learned a lot.
This is the first post in a periodic series I'm calling The Graves Worth Finding. It will pop up now and again.
Do you visit cemeteries, too? I'd love to hear what your favorites are. I'm always making lists for future travel.
