Highgate was the third of the seven great private cemeteries established in a ring around London in the 1830s and 1840s, when the city's churchyards could no longer absorb the dead. Designed by architect Stephen Geary, it opened in 1839 on a steep hillside above Swain's Lane, with views south toward the city. The cemetery was an immediate commercial and social success. Being buried at Highgate became fashionable, and the cemetery's proprietors invested in increasingly elaborate landscaping and architecture. The Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon, designed by James Bunstone Bunning, gave the western grounds an exotic, theatrical quality that was quite deliberate: Victorian cemetery designers understood that grandeur attracted paying customers.

When the west side filled, an eastern extension opened across Swain's Lane in 1854, connected to the original grounds by a bridge. The east side is less dramatic architecturally but holds Highgate's most visited grave: Karl Marx, who died in London in 1883 and was buried in a modest plot. In 1956, the Communist Party of Great Britain erected the massive bronze bust that now marks the site, turning a quiet grave into a political landmark. The cemetery holds approximately 170,000 burials in around 53,000 graves. Among them are the scientist Michael Faraday, the novelist George Eliot, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, the punk musician Malcolm McLaren, and the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with polonium-210 in London in 2006. The range is extraordinary -- radicals and reactionaries, artists and assassins, all sharing the same North London hillside.

By the mid-twentieth century, the private company that had operated Highgate since its founding was in financial trouble. Maintenance ceased. The western cemetery, never as profitable as the east, became overgrown. Monuments cracked and toppled. Trees pushed through roofs. In the early 1970s, reports of a supernatural figure in the cemetery sparked what became known as the Highgate Vampire affair, a media sensation that attracted self-proclaimed vampire hunters, vandals, and occultists to the grounds. Graves were broken open. Bodies were disturbed. The episode was more sensationalism than substance, but the damage to the cemetery was real.

In 1975, the Friends of Highgate Cemetery formed to rescue the grounds from collapse. The organization, now a registered charity, took over management and began the delicate work of stabilizing monuments without destroying the wildness that decades of neglect had created. The western cemetery, where trees and ivy have fused with the stone into something that looks half-ruin and half-forest, is now managed as both a heritage site and a nature reserve. At least 33 species of bird nest in the grounds, along with foxes, bats, and a rich population of insects. The cemetery is designated Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. It remains an active burial ground -- new interments still take place on the east side. The balance the Friends maintain is precise: enough conservation to keep the monuments from crumbling entirely, enough wildness to preserve the atmosphere that makes Highgate unlike any other cemetery in London. It is a place where the Victorian cult of death meets the quiet reclamation of nature, and where visitors come not to mourn but to be reminded of something older and larger than themselves.