Highgate Cemetery West

Reading "The Ink Black Heart" late yesterday morning, I kept coming across mentions of Highgate, the wealthy neighborhood on the other side of Hampstead Heath. One of the book's pivotal events occurs in Highgate Cemetery, a Victorian graveyard known for being the resting place of several famous people.

It occurred to me that I'd visited the east side of Highgate Cemetery, which I wrote about here. But back then, you couldn't enter the west side without being part of a tour group, so I never saw it. That rule changed not too long ago, and now it's possible to take a self-guided walk through Highgate Cemetery West.

So I immediately put the book down and hoofed it over to the cemetery. There's no time like the present, right?

The cemetery is densely packed with ornate and unusual graves, much like the ones I see when I walk Olga in Hampstead Cemetery. But it has several outstanding features, such as its Egyptian Avenue (above), which leads to the so-called Circle of Lebanon. The Egyptian Avenue is a tunnel with a grand entrance built in an Egyptian architectural style, flanked by two obelisks, with doorways to tombs along its walls.

The Circle of Lebanon is a round, sunken path with tombs on both sides; the ones on the inner wall date from the 1830s and are built in an Egyptian style.

Here's another view, looking down into the circle. An old Lebanese cedar tree once stood in the center, but in 2019 it was found to be at risk of collapse and was cut down. There's a new one there now, which you can barely see in front of a larger tree at the left side of the photo above, but it's still tiny and will take a long time to grow to the size of its predecessor. There are some historic images of the Egyptian Avenue and Circle of Lebanon on the cemetery's home page.

Among the unusual graves at Highgate West are this one, known as the "Horse Grave." I thought it might mark the resting place of a famous horseman, but no -- it's the burial spot of the family of Queen Victoria's horse slaughterer!

Thomas Sayers was a well-known prize fighter in his day. Although his dog, Lion, is depicted faithfully resting on his grave, apparently it's not buried there.
 

Alexander Litvinenko was a former Russian FSB officer and dissident who was famously poisoned with Polonium in London in 2006.

Jean Simmons was a well-known film actress who's been in about a million movies, perhaps most memorably "Elmer Gantry" from 1960.

Lucian Freud was a famous painter and grandson of Sigmund.

And, of course, there's George Michael. I was a fan of Wham! when I was just starting college, and if you'd told me back then that almost 40 years later I'd be standing at his grave, I'd never have believed it. He's on the right, buried with his mother and sister.

By the way, although it's interesting to focus on the graves of the famous, it's worth checking out other markers as well. Some people are blessed and/or cursed with the most unusual names. My favorite: Fanny Puzey.

After walking around the west side of the cemetery I made a quick trip to the east side, mainly to check in on Karl Marx. That's him above, with a member of the proletariat working hard behind him.

With that, I wrapped up my tour and headed back home. Another item off my checklist -- seeing all of Highgate Cemetery.