Highgate takes its name from the Bishop of London's hunting estate, which once occupied the land north of the city. The estate was surrounded by a high, deer-proof hedge, and the gate through it — where travellers paid a toll to continue north — gave the area its name. A pub called the Gatehouse, dating from 1670, commemorates the toll-house that stood there. Highgate School, whose founding was permitted by Queen Elizabeth I in 1565, has stood on Hampstead Lane and Highgate Hill for more than 450 years. The village sat astride one of the main northward roads out of London until late Victorian times, when the city finally grew around it and absorbed it into the metropolis, though it has never quite stopped feeling like a village.

Highgate Hill is steep — steep enough that in 1884, the Highgate Hill Cable Tramway opened as the first cable car to be built in Europe, hauling passengers between Archway and Highgate village. The tramway operated until 1909, replaced by conventional vehicles as the technology became unnecessary. The hill that required the cable car still defines the village's character: views from the top take in central London laid out below, and St Michael's Church, built in 1832 and designed by Lewis Vulliamy, occupies nearly the highest point. The church's distinctive copper dome, its green patina visible against the sky, was painted on the interior by Nathaniel Westlake in 1891. The organ was installed in 1945 as a memorial to local victims of the Second World War.

Highgate Cemetery, Victorian in its ambitions and gothic in its atmosphere, opened in 1839 and became the preferred final address for a remarkable range of people. Karl Marx, whose ideas divided the 20th century, is buried in the East Cemetery beneath a large stone monument bearing his name and a declaration from The Communist Manifesto. The novelist George Eliot, the physicist Michael Faraday, Douglas Adams, Christina Rossetti, Radclyffe Hall, Malcolm McLaren, and the singer-songwriter George Michael are all buried here. Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian dissident poisoned in London in 2006, rests here as well. Highgate Cemetery's gothic atmosphere — overgrown Victorian tombs, Egyptian Avenue, the Circle of Lebanon — has made it a setting for Hammer Horror films of the 1970s and more recently for the film Dorian Gray.

Highgate retains the form of a Georgian village — shops, pubs, restaurants, and residential streets gathered around a central collection of Georgian buildings and institutions. Pond Square, behind the High Street, is a registered village green and the centre of communal life, flanked by the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution and the Highgate Society. Rod Stewart was born and raised here. Ray Davies of the Kinks was born in nearby Muswell Hill and lives in Highgate. Comedian Noel Fielding, filmmaker Christopher Nolan, and Liam Gallagher have all called it home. The pub tradition of "Swearing on the Horns" — in which drinkers are sworn in as Freemen of Highgate in a ceremony involving a set of bull's horns — originated here and continues. In Holly Lodge Estate next to the cemetery stands one of only two housing estates built in Britain specifically for single women, once the home and grounds of Baroness Burdett-Coutts.