Hampstead Cemetery was consecrated by the Bishop of London and opened in November 1876, situated on Fortune Green Road in West Hampstead. Despite its name, it lies three-quarters of a mile from Hampstead village and carries a different postcode. The entire site covers 26 acres, with an estimated 60,000 people buried there. A public footpath running from Hocroft Road to Fortune Green bisects the cemetery, effectively splitting it in two. The cemetery has a pair of Gothic mortuary chapels, both Grade II listed buildings — the southern originally Anglican, the northern non-conformist — joined by a shared porte-cochère. Currently only the southern chapel functions as an inter-faith place of worship. The Heritage Lottery Fund has funded restoration work on the buildings.

Joseph Lister, who demonstrated in the 1860s that antiseptic treatment of wounds could dramatically reduce death from infection, is buried at Hampstead Cemetery. So is Marie Lloyd, the music hall star whose earthy, working-class performances made her one of the most beloved entertainers of the Edwardian era — and her daughter, Marie Lloyd Jr., who followed her onto the stage. Tamara Karsavina, Russian prima ballerina and partner of Nijinsky, rests here, as does Kate Greenaway, whose illustrations of children in Victorian costume defined a generation's idea of what childhood looked like. Francis Barraud, painter of His Master's Voice, the image of a terrier listening to a gramophone that became one of the most reproduced images in advertising history, is buried here.

The northeastern corner of the cemetery holds some of the most architecturally remarkable stonemasonry. The Bianchi Monument, properly the grave of the Gall family, is a large triangular Art Deco monument executed in 1937 by Romeo Rathmann, a sculptor born in Trieste. Its most prominent feature — a stylised female angel raising her hands toward heaven — has become well known enough to appear on the covers of local guidebooks. The tomb of James Wilson, Chief Engineer to the Egyptian Government from 1875 to 1901, built in red marble, has an unmistakably Egyptian character. The southwest section contains a large concentration of Celtic crosses, marking the presence of several Scottish families. Mature ash trees shade much of the grounds, with yew, sycamore, silver birch, and Norwegian maple completing a canopy under which butterflies — small white, holly blue, meadow brown — are regularly found.

Hampstead Cemetery holds the graves of 216 Commonwealth service personnel from the First World War and 44 from the Second, along with one Polish and one Czech serviceman from the latter conflict. Those whose graves could not be individually marked are listed on a Screen Wall memorial near the north boundary, beside the main entrance. Paula Rego, the Portuguese painter whose unflinching images of women and power earned her international recognition and a damehood, is buried here, having died in 2022. Joseph Rotblat, the physicist who left the Manhattan Project on moral grounds and later won the Nobel Peace Prize, rests here too. The cemetery is closed to new burials, though an area near the Fortune Green Road exit accepts cremated remains.