Cemeteries in 1900 London: Highgate Cemetery

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Arthur H. Beavan, writing in Imperial London in 1901, continuing his survey of turn-of-the-century cemeteries, had this to say about Highgate Cemetery:

Highgate has a beautiful and far-famed cemetery, the only one which at all resembles Pere la Chaise in Paris.

From its height the view of London is very fine; the ground undulates, and is picturesquely laid out.

The chapel and gate-house are in Tudor style, and the catacombs are of characteristic Egyptian architecture.

Amongst many famous men and women whose mortal remains rest in this cemetery, are George Eliot, Lord Lyndhurst, Michael Faraday, the Rev. F. D. Maurice (Charles Kingsley's "Master").

(Coleridge is wrongly supposed to be buried here. His tomb is beneath the chapel of Highgate School.)

Bunhill Fields, in the City Road, long ago disused, holds the precious dust of John Bunyan, Dr. Isaac Watts, the mother of John and Charles Wesley, Dr. John Owen, Dr. Daniel Williams, Daniel Neal, Dr. Abraham Rees, etc.

It was the Mecca of Nonconformists; and Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, was the Medina of the same.

Here some of their most illustrious dead - Dr. Allon, Dr. Binney, Dr. Brock, Dr. Fletcher, Dr. Hannay, Rev. Paxton Hood, Dr. Raleigh, Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. Andrew Reed, Rev. John Vine Hall, Sir Charles Reed (first Chairman of the London School Board), Dr. John Edmonds, and Mrs. Booth (Mother of the Salvation Army) - await the Resurrection.

It used to be the arboretum in a park belonging to Sir Thomas Abney, the friend of Dr. Isaac Watts, who lived with him for thirty-six years, and died in his mansion close by.

Abney Park is a pleasantly-arranged cemetery, with fine old trees.

It is interesting to stroll about and study the inscriptions, the preponderance of Puritan sentiment being evidenced by the absence of crosses, and the adoption of funeral-urns as headstones.

At Norwood is a large cemetery on hilly ground; its pretty chapels (built in the Pointed style), the trees and flowers which abound, and the brightness of the carefully-tended graves, almost make us forget the solemn object to which the place is devoted.

It is a favourite place of sepulture, and not for the district alone.

Here are buried Douglas Jerrold, L. Blanchard, Sir William Napier, the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, etc.

At Peckham Rye, on the right-hand side of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, is another big cemetery (fifty acres), of the same age as Brompton, and, like it, crowded.

Paddington Cemetery, behind the church in the Harrow Road, was famous for its flower-beds.

Here lie buried, Nollekens the sculptor, Mrs. Siddons, Haydon the painter, and Joanna Southcote the religious monomaniac; though some authorities say she lies in St. John's Wood Chapel churchyard.

The City of London had a cemetery at Little Ilford, whither, as well as to Finchley, were taken the gruesome contents of the vaults of churches about to be pulled down, or that were being encroached upon by street improvements - as recently at St. Clement Danes and St. Mary-le-Strand - always a costly and horrible operation.

Certain large black chests containing an indiscriminate mass of bones, etc, sometimes the relics of plague-victims, were conveyed at dead of night to these cemeteries, where one subsequently came across a large marble-edged and turfed enclosure with overlooking cross, and an inscription notifying that beneath are the mortal remains of a crowd of past worshippers in such and such an old church, removed hither, etc.

Let us hope, never again to be disturbed.

Next: London's Cemeteries in 1900: Bethnal Green: Victoria Park Cemetery