London

I have always been fascinated by London’s great Victorian cemeteries, those mysterious gardens of death spotted from the top of the bus or glimpsed through the window of a passing train. And I’m not the only one: every weekend, parties of visitors trail through the capital’s graveyards, marvelling at the serried ranks of swooping seraphs, lopsided headstones and tilting Celtic crosses. Photographers gravitate to the ivy-wreathed angels of Highgate and the magnificent decay of Abney Park. Our dark tourism indicates a passion for the past – some of us searching for lost ancestors, others merely intrigued by the Victorian urge to memorialise death – and reveals a unique sense of the national character that has sadly been lost in the undistinguished municipal cemeteries of today.

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Freed from the prescriptive burial laws of an earlier period, which had ordained the plainest of memorials, Victorians commemorated their dead with a wild unconventionality that contributed to the eclectic appearance of their cemeteries. Highgate’s Western Cemetery includes a monument to a menagerist topped by a circus lion and a life-sized four-poster bed celebrating the founder of Maples’ furniture store. At Kensal Green, the original WH Smith is buried under a huge book, while the tomb of Andrew Ducrow, a stunt rider described as ‘the colossus of equestrians’, who could carry five children on a table with only his teeth, is an extraordinary Egyptian extravaganza that cost his family £3,000 and was condemned by the Builder as ‘ponderous coxcombry!’. But then the Builder had a more conservative approach to burial. This was the journal that decreed: ‘The principles of proportion and of harmony and grace and form which are required by a well-dressed woman in her costume are equally applicable when she comes to choose a tombstone for her husband.’

My interest in cemeteries goes back to my schooldays, when I used to walk home through a massive Victorian cemetery in Nottingham. When I moved to London, cemeteries became an escape from the turmoil of Earl’s Court Road. Years later, inspired to write about Highgate, I found it was impossible to restrict myself to one London cemetery, or even one historical period. London itself, I realised, was one giant grave. Christopher Wren, supervising excavations for the new St Paul’s in 1673, after the old cathedral had been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, found ‘the burial places of Saxon times. The Saxons, as it appeared, were accustomed to line their graves with chalk-stones, though some more eminent were entombed in coffins of whole stones. Below these were British graves, where were found ivory and wooden pins of a hard wood, seemingly box, in abundance, of about six inches long; it seems the bodies were only wrapped up, and pinned in wooden shrouds, which being consumed, the pins remained entire. In the same row, and deeper, were Roman urns intermixed. This was eighteen feet deep or more, and belonged to the colony, where Romans and Britons lived and died together.’