IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Swains Lane, LONDON, N6 6PJ

The approach to Highgate Cemetery.

Highgate West Cemetery opened in 1839 and the East Cemetery in 1860. This is in the old West Cemetery which is closed to casual visitors but can be visited by guided tours. Ian Nairn in 1966 in Nairn's London had this to say about Highgate West Cemetery: "There are better reasons for going here than to look at the grave of Karl Marx. This is the creepiest place in London; no Dickensian stretch of the river can match this calculated exercise in stucco horror, now itself decomposing. The entrance is well downhill in Swains Lane, and at first the landscape is ordinary. But as you wind up the hill it becomes more and more overgrown, choked in winter by dead fronds with an unnerving resemblance to Spanish moss. The landscape looks less and less like London, more and more like Louisiana.... Nothing seems real but death at its greyest and clammiest. The cemetery closes well before dark, and a good job too." This house, which is one of three with entrances in Swains Lane but next to the cemetery, must have a very peaceful (if creepy) view when sitting out on the balcony.

Highgate West Cemetery opened in 1839 and the East Cemetery in 1860. This is in the old West Cemetery which is closed to casual visitors but can be visited by guided tours. This is the grave of Michael Faraday in the Dissenters' section. He had the option of being buried in Westminster Abbey but chose to lie here. He did not even want a gravestone but that was added later by his admirers. Swains Lane is on the other side of the wall. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday for more information.

The walk takes you past a few junctions of paths in Highgate cemetery like the one ahead

Carl Rosa was a German-born musical impresario and founded an English opera company known as the Carl Rosa Opera Company. His tomb is in the Circle of Lebanon, just beyond the Egyptian Avenue.

The tomb of Thomas Sayers the bare-knuckle prize fighter. The dog which guards the grave is a mastiff called Lion and was chief mourner at his funeral because he said it loved him more than his wife who was estranged from him and living with another man. 10,000 people lined the streets to watch the procession go by.

This is part of the dissenters cemetery at Highgate