Highgate Cemetery: Victorian Valhalla

Highgate Cemetery: Victorian Valhalla by Felix Barker. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780881620221.

Highgate Cemetery, clinging to the southern slope of Highgate Hill, looks out across London to the Epsom Downs in the distance. It is one of the great cemeteries of the world (to those who know it, one of the Wonders) but in many ways it is also one of the most secret. A maze of rising terraces, winding paths, tombs and catacombs, it is a monument to the Victorian age and to the Victorian attitude to death. Containing some of the most celebrated - and often most eccentric - funerary architecture to be found anywhere, it has also, as nature has gradually taken it over, become a wild-life reserve near the center of London. Now after many years of neglect, the cemetery is being lovingly restored, the dense foliage cut back, nature brought under control and its treasures revealed. In Highgate Cemetery: Victorian Valhalla the London historian Felix Barker tells fully and for the first time the story of this burial ground. But, above all, the book contains a unique pictorial record of its moods and its monuments caught over the last twenty years by John Gay whose photographs superbly and evocatively convey the spirit of the place.