The resurrection of Highgate• AS A RESULT of devoted efforts, Highgate Cemetery is. so to say, coming back to life. The total cost of pre• sent and contemplated repair and building work is around £300,000. to be paid from various grants and with much of the work being done by young people, otherwise une'mploycd, under the auspices of the Manpower Services Project. Experimental work has been started towards finding the best method of repairing the catacombs, while other restoration work goes ahead on the entrance chapels. The necropolis was laid out b:v the London Cemetery Company in the late 1830s as part of a general movement for the more sanitary and seemly disposal of London's dead, away from the over-crowded churchyards. It was planned and largely built by Stephen Geary (later interred there), who also dc>signed cemeteries elsewhere and the Holborn Wine and Spirit Vaults. Perhaps the most dramatic frdture of the Highgate CemelC'ry is the cataLOmbs and their ··· J'.gyptian-style approaches. Bl'fore Highgate got into the bc-nificent custody of the l'ricnds of Highgate Ccmclcry thc-w tombs were melancholy l'nough to make one suic.idal. I Egyptian entrance to the catacombs, Highgate Cemetery. Drawing onrc took a party of young television camera people there to by Geoffrey Fletcher. film ii. and it subdued them for Lachaise, but the silences of Nubian lion; Nero, the highly half a day afterwards. Highgate are enlivened by tire polished coloured gentleman: The short-lived Egyptian song of birds from leafy niches "Hutch" Lillywhite, the toptaste came in with Belzoni's of thorn and bramble (it is a hatted and side-whiskered · and more tha~ archaeological discoveries in place providing for life as well cricketer: Egypt, and produced such fanta- as death), whereas the chief 160,000 others, awaiting th~ :1ies as the vanished Egyptian sounds of the Parisian necro- general Resurrection. Hall in Piccadilly and the polis are of the distant children Highgate early became 1'a delightful shop and house still in the Buttes Montmartre. venue for sightseers. Today, 1it preserved in Hertford. A similar is highly organised to this end. fashion, inspired by the disWho are these arrayed in If funds are to be raised for <'nvery of the Tutankhamun white robes? Why, Alfred restoration and upkeep, this is tomb, produced several Egyp- Stevens. notable Victorian art• no doubt inevitable. Yet thert. is tian cinemas de luxe and the ist and sculptor: the great Fara- surely a novel way of fund-raisRlack Cat factory at Mornington day: gentle, melancholy Chris- ing hitherto overlooked: let us Crescent. tin a Rossetti; George sell Karl Marx, gravestone and Highgate has been compared Wombwell, circus proprietor all. with a certificate of authenand owner of the famous ticity, to the Russians. to the more urban Pere-
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