A Guide to North London’s Most Atmospheric and Historically Saturated Village
Highgate: Elevated in Every Sense
Highgate is the north London village perched at approximately one hundred and thirty metres above sea level on the ridge that separates the Thames valley from the northern countryside, a position that gives it views, fresh air, and a sense of remove from the city below that its residents cultivate with the dedication of people who have found somewhere good and are determined to keep it that way. The village has a Georgian high street, a cemetery of international significance, access to Hampstead Heath from its western side, a pub with a view, and the graves of several people whose ideas shaped the modern world to a degree that makes visiting them feel less like tourism and more like obligation. Highgate is not humble about any of this. It does not need to be.
Highgate Cemetery: The Most Atmospheric Place in London
Highgate Cemetery is divided into two sections — the East Cemetery, open to independent visitors, and the West Cemetery, accessible only by guided tour — and together they constitute one of the great Victorian cemeteries of Europe: seventeen acres of elaborate funerary architecture, Egyptian Avenue, the Circle of Lebanon with its catacombs, and a landscape of such theatrical gothicism that it appears to have been designed specifically for atmospheric photography and was in fact designed specifically to sell burial plots to wealthy Victorians who wanted their deaths to be as impressive as their lives. The effect, two centuries on, is extraordinary.
Karl Marx is buried in the East Cemetery, beneath a monument of such confident scale that it was clearly commissioned by people who expected the philosophy to outlast the monument. It has, largely. The grave is visited daily by people from across the world who stand before it with expressions ranging from reverence to curiosity to the specific look of someone who has made a very long journey to see a very large stone head. George Eliot is also buried in the East Cemetery, in a grave that receives fewer visitors and is arguably more deserving of them. Highgate Cemetery charges admission to the East Cemetery and requires booking for the West Cemetery tours. Both are worth the price. The West Cemetery tour, in particular, is one of the genuinely atmospheric London experiences available for a modest fee.
Highgate Village: The Georgian Street That Survived
Highgate’s village centre — the stretch of South Grove and Highgate High Street around the junction at the top of Highgate Hill — retains a Georgian character that most north London villages have lost to development and the requirements of vehicular traffic. The streets are narrow. The buildings are eighteenth century. The pubs have been trading since before the American republic existed. The Flask Inn on Highgate West Hill dates from 1663 in its original form and has been rebuilt and modified since but retains the atmosphere of a pub that understands its function and has been performing it long enough to do so without effort. It is one of the finer pubs in north London and the view from the garden — on a clear day extending to the South Downs — is available at the price of a pint.
The Pond and the Heath Connection
Hampstead Heath extends along Highgate’s western side and is accessible directly from the village through several entry points that open onto the heath’s Highgate Ponds section. The Highgate Men’s Pond and Highgate Mixed Pond are natural swimming ponds that have been in use since the Victorian era and are maintained by the City of London. They are cold. The regulars are enthusiastic about cold. The surrounding heath landscape at the Highgate end — dense woodland, birdsong, the specific silence that eight hundred acres of open land creates within a city — is among the more disorienting free experiences available in London: the sense, within ten minutes of a tube station, of being somewhere genuinely rural.
The Historical Residents: Coleridge, Betjeman, and the Rest
Highgate has been attracting literary and intellectual residents since the early nineteenth century, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge spent the last eighteen years of his life here under the care of Dr James Gillman, whose house on The Grove he used as both refuge and study. John Betjeman lived in Highgate. A.E. Housman lived in Highgate. The concentration of blue plaques in the village is such that a walking tour using them as waypoints covers most of the significant streets without requiring any additional navigation.
Getting There
Highgate station (Northern line, High Barnet branch) is the tube approach, a 1940s above-ground station that emerges at the bottom of the hill rather than in the village itself, requiring a five-minute walk uphill that is the topographic introduction to everything that makes Highgate what it is. The 143 and 263 buses serve the village directly. Walking from Archway up Highgate Hill is the most historically appropriate arrival method and takes fifteen minutes. Arrive having already decided which cemetery section you want. Book the West Cemetery tour in advance. Go on a weekday morning in October when the leaves are turning and the mist has not yet lifted. This is the correct atmospheric condition for Highgate.
Final Verdict
Highgate is the most complete village experience available within the London boundary — Georgian streets, a cemetery of theatrical magnificence, a pub with a view, and access to the heath that makes the whole experience feel like a country visit that happens to be served by the Northern line. It is worth every bit of the hill. Come for the cemetery. Stay for the Flask. Walk the heath. Appreciate that Marx and Eliot are within walking distance of each other and that this is a fact about London that rewards reflection.
More: Private Eye | NewsThump
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
