The final resting place of some very famous Londoners, Highgate Cemetery is a wonderfully overgrown maze of ivy-cloaked Victorian tombs and time-shattered urns. Visitors are free to wander through the East Cemetery, with its memorials to Karl Marx, George Eliot and Douglas Adams, but the most atmospheric part of the cemetery is the foliage-shrouded West Cemetery, laid out in 1839. Only accessible on an organised tour (book ahead, dress respectfully and arrive 30mins early), the shady paths wind past gloomy catacombs, grand Victorian pharaonic tombs, and the graves of notables such as Christina Rossetti, the scientist Michael Faraday and poisoned Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. Karl Marx Visitors flock from all around the world to see the grave of Karl Marx, whose political philosophy has had such an impact on the modern world. He was originally buried in his wifes grave on a small side path, but in 1956 a new monument featuring a gigantic bust by the socialist sculptor Laurence Bradshaw was installed in a more prominent location. Funds were raised by the Marx Memorial Fund, set up by the Communist Party in 1955. Since then, many people who have been inspired by his thinking have been buried nearby – among them Yusuf Dadoo, the South African communist and anti-apartheid activist, and Claudia Jones, political activist and founder of the Notting Hill Carnival. Ironically his ideological antithesis, the liberal political theorist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), is buried almost directly opposite.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 22:22:02 +0000
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