Stray away from the endless paths winding around Highgate Cemetery and you might just find yourself drowning in an ocean of ivy, rotten branches and two hundred year old stone. If you keep on, you might meet a well-known philosopher, pop artist or Victorian author under the guise of a man; people you would never dream of being in the company of today. Or maybe you will encounter someone new, Julius Beer perhaps, whose daughter shares his Mausoleum of Halicarnassus with angels, or Tom Sayers, bare-knuckle prize fighter, whose dog, Lion, will remain by his side for all of eternity.
Suddenly in London, you are transported to Egypt, two massive obelisks tower over you and the memorialization of the dead comes with ease. From Africa to Asia, the Circle of Lebanon introduces the oldest resident of the cemetery; a huge cedar tree watching over the sleepers in the tombs below.
Underground and into the catacombs, often a transitional resting place for the many residents of the cemetery, you are lost in darkness. If you find your way, you will reach the terrace, and a changed world. Nature has found control and the entirety of Victorian London comes into view. Overgrowth has been replaced with carefully planted flowers, shrubs and trees and the cemetery’s lonely residents have found accompaniment in visitors taking leisure in the pristine surroundings and magnificent city views. Here you witness Victorian entrepreneurship at its finest; development of such places has never been as big as it is now in the hands of the London Cemetery Company. A procession slinks in, a familiar face appears; arguably the greatest author of his time and ours. Here Charles Dickens’ wife takes her final rest, where she will sleep undisturbed in perpetuity. Time gets lost, bomber planes soar overhead and death drowns the cemetery in new ways. Different visitors arrive, in a new kind of black, causing disruption to the original home of nature’s freedom. Memories are vandalized and uncertainty looms.
A fourteen year old girl arrives in skinny jeans. Dragged along by her parents and enslaved by technology, she has no care for this forgotten world. Yet old memories touch new ones and she finds solace in the stories of the city of the dead. Unknowingly to her, this past will guide her passions and become her future; and all she did was walk a winding path in Highgate Cemetery.
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