The Backdrop

I have been fortunate enough to carve several memorials in the world famous Highgate Cemetery over the years and we installed another two bespoke memorials very recently. It’s a wonderful place to explore, full of remarkable tombs, catacombs, full-on masonry, memorial sculpture, fine lettering, follies, stories and other one-off oddities, oh, and very inquisitive foxes! There are quirky sculptural works alongside Victorian traditional monumental masonry extravaganzas, there are exquisite modest stones and huge architectural ego-driven status symbols.

The cemetery opened in 1839 as populations burgeoned in central London where burial grounds were generally churches with graveyards attached and they could not cope with the rising population. Seven new large cemeteries were built in what were the outskirts of London, known as the Magnificent Seven.

The Setting

The original part of the cemetery on the West side of Swains Lane was designed by Stephen Geary, and it became his final resting place. He designed the Egyptian Avenue (see the Egyptian inspired columns at the top of this post) and the Terrace Catacombs pictured below. In 1854 more land was purchased to create the Eastern extension to the cemetery across the road which opened in 1860. Here are a few random pictures to give an impression of the overall setting.

The People

Highgate became a fashionable place to be buried, and to end up there in such illustrious company was ‘de rigueur’. As a result there are more famous people in Highgate Cemetery than any other cemetery in London. The most visited memorial here seems to be the somewhat immodest monument to Karl Marx, which is quite a capitalist sort of memorial when compared to that of George Michael below.

There are also stones to Lucien Freud (painter) Malcolm McLaren (punk impresario) Beryl Bainbridge (writer) Jeremy Beadle (presenter who is no longer ‘about’) Bert Jansch (amazing folk guitar legend who I saw live lots of times over the years) Michael Faraday (physicist) Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm novelist) Ian Holm (actor) Bob Hoskins (actor) Sir Peter Laurie (Lord Mayor of London) Alexander Litvinenko (Russian dissident) Christina Rossetti (poet) Tom Sayers (pugilist) Jean Simmons (actress) Douglas Adams (writer) Patrick Caulfield (painter) George Eliot (novelist) Tim Pigott-Smith (actor) Ralph Richardson (actor) Storm Thorgerson (album cover graphic designer, Dark Side of the Moon etc) and Max Wall (with that silly walk!). There are hundreds of other artists, writers, politicians among the 170,000 people buried here.

The stones

As with many cemeteries (but not all) the rules are a lot more flexible than those of an English Churchyard for example, and indeed some originality in memorial design is generally encouraged. I think people often fear regulations, and that can lead to a timidity and a reluctance to making something too different, which is a real shame – we are all individuals and that uniqueness should be celebrated in these tributes.

Even some of the stones I really don’t like in Highgate are refreshing (for example the MM one below). So, here are a few highlights I have picked out on my wanderings, I certainly don’t like all of these by any means but they show the range of memorial sculptures that are scattered among the trees.

These next few are among my favourites, although some of the really OTT mausoleums are pretty impressive. I didn’t photograph everything as there’s a lot to take in and the best way to experience the place would be to have a day there.

The last stone above is infamous, designed by Patrick Caulfield for himself. I love it.

My work in Highgate

These next few pictures show some stones I have erected in Highgate Cemetery, in chronological order.

The first stone I was commissioned to make for Highgate Cemetery was for Mehmet Aksoy (also known as ‘Firaz Dag’). Mehmet was a British-Kurdish filmmaker and activist who was killed while covering the battle to retake Raqqa in Northern Syria from ISIS. He was embedded with the People’s Protection Units when ISIS fighters overran a base where he was staying in September 2017. Aksoy did not tell his parents about his plans before travelling to Rojava in West Kurdistan/North Syria in June 2017. He did not want to fight with the Kurdish forces in Syria, but wanted to tell the stories of fighters through his films. The stone is Aberllefenni Welsh slate (see more examples of slate memorials here), with a riven section and a polished lower section.

The stone above is in what is known as ‘The mound’ in the East part of the cemetery. In fact my two subsequent commissions in Highgate were for the same area. In this section the stones sit on a pre-cast concrete beam, which necessitates the use of a stone plinth that sits on the concrete. This affects the design to some extent, and there are size restrictions, but within these parameters lots can be done. These stones are quite traditional in comparison to a lot of my memorial sculptures. The first one is blue-grey Welsh slate with simple lettering, the second one is Kilkenny Irish limestone, which is a dark blue grey colour when honed, but it will fade to a mid grey over time. The stones in this section are placed back to back with other stones and therefore there is no scope to carve the reverse of the stone. In the case of the Gillian Oxford memorial, where there was a lot of text to incorporate and carved imagery (hollyhocks and ballet shoes) I opted to having some text on the edge of the stone to ‘spread the load’. There is also room for a second name to be added later on.

The next stone I was asked to make was over the road in the older West Section. This was a lovely commission to carve a stone for Peter Usborne. Peter was co-founder of Private Eye in 1961 and set up Usborne Publishing in 1973. You may be familiar with Usborne Children’s books, I certainly read a lot of them to my kids. The design was very much inspired by Peter’s interests, with help from his son Martin. The Usborne logo is a hot air balloon and Peter collected lions. The family decided it would be great to have a friendly lion on the stone and the idea of the hot air balloon drifting skywards seemed quite a potent one. This material is York stone, and you can see ore examples of my York stone memorials in my gallery. and the memorial is in a discreet almost hidden section of comparatively modest stones. It’s quite near the memorial to Lucien Freud, and right opposite Bob Hoskin’s stone, and close to that of Ian Holm.

The final images are of a stone we installed only yesterday. The client had some very interesting ideas and after many discussions with the cemetery office as to what would be allowed, she contacted me with a rough sketch. I will include this below as it’s interesting to see how the design for the stone developed from this sketch. I think her ideas were inspired by the Patrick Caulfield stone above (DEAD) and the various ‘doorways’ around the cemetery. She also wanted zero maintenance and as dark a stone as possible. The cemetery (luckily) don’t allow polished reflective stones, but honed granite can look quite classy, and from a distance at first glance it can easily be mistaken for slate. The downside of granite is that it’s extremely hard and brittle and therefore not nice to carve by hand. The lettering on this memorial was designed with hand drawn flourishes and then digitised so that a rubber stencil can be made and the lettering was sandblasted. The winged hourglass is a nod to the memorials of the 17-18th century that feature imagery relating to the passing of time and angel motifs. I designed it to fit the triangular space on the pediment which seemed rather empty. Carving that was really challenging given the material.

The text is from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, taken from the passage below uttered by Macbeth after he hears of Lady Macbeth’s passing.

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”