London's Other Underground

To get to London's other underground, you have to go over a lovely hill, Hampstead Heath's Parliament Hill. You've seen it in pleasant English movies like Imagine Me and You.


At the end of that movie, a happy Piper Perabo and Lena Headey sit on bench not unlike the one behind this joyful wheaten terrier, sipping coffee in the cold.


The hill, and the heath, are full of life.


But on the other side, there lurks death.

This is the Paget Baxter family tomb in Highgate Cemetery, marked simply with an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, a symbol of the circularity of life and death. I had been planning on writing this blog for quite some time, but last week my friend Julie began a series of blogs about Mt. Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Mass, and I sure didn't want to be a copy cat. At home with a cold today, and challenged by Julie's new post to use the word ouroboros, I realized that time had indeed come.

Highgate was opened in 1839; funny to think of it this way, but the establishment of it and 6 other cemeteries around the perimeter of the city really marked how London had grown -- it was now so big that it had run out of room for its dead. The original graveyard, the west cemetery, is a maze of stones and monuments, trees and vines, and complex avenues of mausoleums. The Paget Baxter family tomb sits on this curving lane:


Our small tour (the only way to access the west cemetery unless you have a family pass, so to speak) began at the entrance to what is called Egyptian Avenue.


We walked around the Circle of Lebanon, where an enormous cedar sits atop some of the tombs.



In places, it is difficult to see where one grave ends and another begins. Ouroboros again, a never-ending circle?



The Victorian sensibility offers plenty of allegory; here an angel lowers his trumpet to mark a death:


Unintentionally, perhaps, a sylvan Calvary.


Highgate is the home of all comers. The Russian spy-turned-dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with polonium-210 in 2006, is virtually the first grave you come across. You can't help but giggle at some of the names you see: poor Mrs. Tickler.


I am sure that she was in fact dearly beloved, but judging by the difference in their gravestones, her children didn't have near the resurces to prove it as well as banker Arthur Nichols proved his love for his wife Mary, "who fell asleep 7th May 1909."


And then there is the tomb that made me cry, all for the loyalty of a dog:

The grave of prizefighter-turned-publican Tom Sayers, who died of alcohol poisoning in 1865. 100,000 mourners, led by his faithful dog Lion, followed his funeral from Camden Town to Highgate.

The east cemetery opened in 1854 and is where we find Karl Marx. It's perhaps wrong of me as a lefty to think that a monument of this size (you could probably live inside Marx's head quite comfortably) painted in gold is a bit over the top for the person who articulated a redistribution of wealth "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs." Well, I've never claimed to be a Marxist.


I would love to know who this booklover was:


Jeremy Beadle was a television presenter:


Daphne Rosetta Seaton's cat keeps her company, though I seriously doubt that it led a parade of mourners. (Yes, this one made me cry too.)


And this person just had a wicked sense of humour -- no passing away or falling asleep here!


No ouroboros of note in the eastern cemetery. But much proof of love which, I suppose, is another way of saying that the circle of life continues.