News

New audio artwork at Highgate Cemetery

6 June 2022

Highgate Cemetery is delighted to be partnering with the Stuart Hall Foundation on a new artist commission which will be presented as part of this year’s Highgate Festival.

The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening is a 40-minute immersive soundscape from artist Trevor Mathison that offers a re-examination of the lives and histories of those laid to rest at Highgate Cemetery in the context of contemporary anti-racism movements. The commission honours the memory and ongoing impact on contemporary national debates of cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall, who is buried at the cemetery. Audiences are invited to listen to the soundscape on headphones as they follow their own pathway through Highgate Cemetery’s beautifully conserved landscape of monuments, buildings, flora and fauna.

Trevor Mathison developed The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening by exploring the legacy of Stuart Hall (1932 – 2014) and his arrival in the UK from Jamaica in 1951 and taking a historical look at Highgate Cemetery: how it came into being, the radical thinkers buried there, and its botanical meditative landscape. The piece imagines those that are resting – philosophers, artists, writers from different periods – coming together to expand on their lives’ work and debate with each other. Mathison has incorporated field recordings from the Highgate Cemetery and its surrounding areas, as well as audio excerpts from Stuart Hall’s 2004 lecture ‘Through the Prism of Intellectual Life’, text from Hall’s posthumous memoir ‘Familiar Stranger’ spoken by actor Joseph Black and poetry written and performed by Selina Nwulu.

Speaking on the commission, Trevor Mathison said: “I am fascinated by the number of individuals buried in the cemetery who have contributed so greatly to our own realities and in various different ways; from scientists, philosophers, writers, painters, academics and many more. First among them for me, is Stuart Hall who was one of the most important social and cultural thinkers of our time. I feel the need to keep them close, to acknowledge their work and think about how their ideas and questions continue on through our own present-day debates. I have also been drawn to the plants that grow alongside the graves in Highgate Cemetery, imagining how voices might permeate, connect and continue to flourish through the rich layers of its natural landscape. My hope is that the soundscape provides a meditative space for the listener to relate back to the cemetery, reflect on Stuart Hall’s legacy and in this way, to consider the community and dialogue resting there, with all its multiple, active connections that we are being invited into.”

STUART HALL AND HIGHGATE CEMETERY

Professor Stuart Hall was a member of the ‘Windrush Generation’ who arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951. He became a leading figure in Britain’s radical tradition, whose work transformed the nature of public conversations around culture, race, and identity at a pivotal time of immigration and social change. He was a prolific writer and a deeply committed teacher with a firm belief in collaborative projects, a desire to communicate and an expansive range of interests which continue to have vitality and relevance to those hoping and working for change.

Unlike many of the Windrush generation, Stuart did not wish to return ‘home’ to Jamaica on his death. Despite a long and uneasy relationship to belonging in Britain, he imagined he would be in good company at Highgate Cemetery, settled amongst a community of Left intellectuals – Karl Marx, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel, Claudia Jones – and close enough to his North West London home for it to feel familiar. Here, he is settled, in the company of friends and others who have contributed in critical and imaginative ways to Britain’s cultural and political landscape. Like many visitors to the Highgate Cemetery, Stuart Hall’s family and friends have developed a living relationship with the site which resonates with the Stuart Hall Foundation’s interest in bringing the past, present and future into a meaningful dialogue with one another.

Becky Hall, a Stuart Hall Foundation trustee and daughter of Stuart Hall, said: “The origins of this project lie in a conversation on love and loss traced along the much-loved pathways of Highgate Cemetery and framed by the shifting seasonal hues of a cool, June day. A pinch of mischief was involved, as well as generosity, graft and collaboration – all vital ingredients for public, political and personal work that would have pleased Stuart greatly. It is with gratitude from his family and the Stuart Hall Foundation that we celebrate Trevor Mathison’s truly special capacity to bring the wonder of sound and space alive in conversation and welcome his public invitation to listen.”

The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening was commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation in partnership with Highgate Cemetery and LUX, and with funding from Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust.

Ian Dungavell, Chief Executive of Highgate Cemetery, said: “Highgate Cemetery is thrilled to be a part of Trevor Mathison’s new work, The Conversation Continues, which responds to the community of Left intellectuals buried here and the Cemetery’s wonderfully romantic landscape. As the UK’s most famous cemetery and the final home of thinkers from around the world, Highgate Cemetery is the perfect setting in which to reflect on Stuart Hall’s legacy of debates around culture, race and identity. Cemeteries are the natural place for such reflections.”

HOW TO LISTEN

The piece is available for the first time from Saturday 11th June 2022 as part of Highgate Festival in London (11th – 19th June). It is recommended audiences experience the soundscape from within Highgate Cemetery as intended by the artist Trevor Mathison.

For more information on how to listen, visit the Stuart Hall Foundation’s website. Buy your cemetery entrance tickets at highgatecemetery.org/visit/stuart-hall-foundation

For those unable to visit the cemetery in person, a video version will be released online on Monday 20 June.

ACCOMPANYING PROGRAMME

The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening will be accompanied by a programme of special events and screenings in June including:

An evening preview event at Highgate Cemetery Chapel on Thursday 9 June featuring a conversation between Trevor Mathison and Aasiya Lodhi, with a reading by actor Joseph Black of extracts from ‘Familiar Stranger’. As part of the event, the conversation as well as the commission’s video version will be livestreamed to registered online attendees via Zoom.

A video accompaniment to the soundscape created by Trevor Mathison made available online for a limited time period from June 20th for remote audiences who are unable to access Highgate Cemetery in person.

A unique performance event, Midsummer Night, with Trevor Mathison at LUX on Friday 24th June that expands upon where The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening began, through tonal poetic movements, reflective visuals from Highgate Cemetery, and experimental spoken word.

Major new commission by artist Phyllida Barlow at Highgate Cemetery

25 June 2021

Studio Voltaire has announced a major new site–specific sculpture commission by internationally celebrated artist Phyllida Barlow at Highgate Cemetery, London. The commission will be staged in the open–air courtyard of the West Cemetery, presenting
a special opportunity to encounter ambitious new work by this leading artist within an extraordinary and historic site.

The large–scale commission, act, reaches up to five meters in height. A tower of fabric wrapped poles are enclosed within a commanding structure of sombre, concrete screed panels flecked with colourful paint. Knitted together, these bulwarks of material create an imposing, sepulchral form. However, their exposed supporting frameworks reveal stage–set properties, undermining any initial appearance of monumentality.

Barlow’s structures of stacked, bound and balanced materials have an imposing physical presence and yet often appear at the edge of collapse. Her assemblages are formed of inexpensive industrial or everyday materials – cardboard, fabric, timber, polystyrene, plaster, scrim and cement – painted in vibrant colours, the seams of their construction at times left visible. Tensions in Barlow’s work between transformation, entropy and precarity resonate strongly with the chosen site’s character and surrounding monuments. Her commission is both a dramatic and contemplative response to the elaborate, melancholic funerary architecture of the cemetery, and will bring audiences into unexpected dialogues with a landmark site.

Barlow’s work sits within a site of historic importance and is framed by the courtyard’s impressive colonnade. Famed for its special atmosphere, the cemetery’s sinuous paths wind up a steep, wooded hill and ivy–clad memorials, forming a secluded and evocative landscape. The West Cemetery is home to the most impressive architectural features of Highgate Cemetery, including the Egyptian Avenue, Circle of Lebanon and Terrace Catacombs.

This commission is presented in partnership with Highgate Cemetery. Dr Ian Dungavell, Chief Executive of Highgate Cemetery, said: "Cemeteries were the outdoor sculpture parks of the nineteenth century. Visitors would be inspired by the achievements of those who had gone before them, and they would be improved by looking at the artistic monuments and poetic inscriptions. Masons were sent to study antique sculpture in the British Museum. Barlow's sculpture will be in the courtyard at Highgate Cemetery, mediating between the urban buzz outside and the peaceful tranquillity of the burial landscape. Its themes are entirely appropriate to the setting. We hope it will inspire visitors in the same way as the nineteenth century monuments, and inculcate a frame of mind conducive to cemetery visiting."

In 2010, Studio Voltaire commissioned BLUFF, a significant exhibition of Barlow’s work which played an important role in raising the artist’s international profile. This new exhibition, a decade later, celebrates a pivotal commission within Studio Voltaire’s history, and reflects their track record of supporting artists at key stages in their careers. Barlow is a renowned contemporary artist, whose work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021), The Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019), Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2015) and Tate Britain, London (2014). In 2017, she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.

act was commissioned as part of Studio Voltaire elsewhere, a series of commissions taking place offsite whilst undertaking The Studio Voltaire Capital Project.

act is supported by Arts Council England, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Art Fund.

Edition production was kindly supported by Hauser & Wirth.
 

The Highgate Cemetery Bill

28 November 2019

For more on the Highgate Cemetery Bill, see our page on Renewal

IN PARLIAMENT :        SESSION 2019–20

HIGHGATE CEMETERY BILL

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that application has been made to Parliament by the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust  (“the Trust”) for leave to introduce a Bill in the new Session under the above name or short title.

The purposes of the Bill are to confer powers on the Trust, who is the burial authority responsible for Highgate Cemetery (“the cemetery”).  These powers would authorise the Trust to extinguish rights of burial in grave spaces where such a right has not been exercised for at least 75 years from the last burial or if there has been no burial, from the date of the grant of that right. Where such rights are extinguished, the Bill also authorises the Trust to disturb and reinter human remains in graves in the cemetery in order to increase the space for further interments in such graves and for the improvement of the cemetery. The powers would also enable the Trust to use appropriately or remove altogether from the cemetery any memorials on such graves. The same powers are already available to local authorities in London in respect of cemeteries for which they are responsible.  The powers would enable the Trust, following consultation with or at the request of Historic England and the London Borough of Camden, to designate “protected graves”.  If a grave is protected in this way, then the powers to extinguish burial rights and disturb remains can only be exercised with the agreement of Historic England and the London Borough of Camden. The Bill also makes provision for the repeal of historic and redundant legislation pertaining to the London Cemetery Company, which was the statutory company originally responsible for the cemetery, together with other ancillary provisions.

Click to download a copy of the Highgate Cemetery Bill.

On and after 4 December 2019 a copy of the Bill may be inspected and copies of it obtained at the price of £3 each at the offices of:

Highgate Cemetery
Swain’s Lane
London N6 6PJ

Mondays to Fridays: 10:00 to 16:00

Saturdays, Sundays and Bank Holidays:
By arrangement (Telephone: 020 8340 1834)

BDB Pitmans LLP
50 Broadway, Westminster,
London SW1H 0BL

Mondays to Fridays: 09:30 to 17:30

Saturdays, Sundays, 27 December 2019 and Bank Holidays: Closed

Objection to the Bill may be made by depositing a Petition against it in the Office of the Clerk of the Parliaments, if the Bill is introduced in the House of Lords, or in the Private Bill Office of the House of Commons, if the Bill is introduced in that House.  The latest date for the deposit of such a Petition in the First House will be 30 January 2020 if the Bill originates in the House of Commons, or 6 February 2020 if it originates in the House of Lords.  The latest date for deposit of such a Petition in the Second House will be the tenth day after the first reading of the Bill in that House or, if the House is not sitting on that day, on the next day on which that House sits.

Further information regarding petitioning may be found on the Parliament’s webpage at: https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/bills/private/privatebillpetition/ or by contacting either—

the Office of the Clerk of the Parliaments, House of Lords:

E-mail: hlprivatebills@parliament.uk

Telephone: 020 7219 3231

the Private Bill Office of the House of Commons:

E-mail: prbohoc@parliament.uk

Telephone: 020 7219 6008

Highgate Cemetery Conservation Plan

20 February 2019

This is the Conservation Plan for Highgate Cemetery. (26MB pdf) The plan has been prepared by a leading multi-disciplinary consultancy, Alan Baxter Ltd, and so it benefits from their considerable knowledge and experience. We consulted members, volunteers and the public about what the plan might include and the plan responds to that consultation. The resulting document sets out the history and significance of this special place, and explains how we propose to look after it in the future.

There are three main strands to the proposals:

Trees, monuments and buildings will be better looked after
Trees of the most suitable species in the most suitable places and in good health will make it easier, and safer, to appreciate the quality of our historic landscape. Furthermore, not only will they be less likely to damage memorials, this will be better for biodiversity too.  In addition, we would like to reveal many of the memorials currently hidden by ivy, and to restore the more important of them so that future generations will be able to appreciate them as we do. We would also like to return our chapel and its setting to its proper appearance, especially by reinstating the chapel’s lost cupola, pinnacles and finials.

The cemetery will continue to function as an active burial ground
A closed cemetery is a dead cemetery, so we will investigate how we can continue to provide for the burial needs of current and future generations. This could involve reclaiming grave space which has never been used, or re-using graves that are no longer wanted, or creating additional spaces for cremated remains in columbaria and attractive garden settings. All of this can be knitted in carefully and respectfully to our wonderful historic environment.

Visiting will be easier, and more rewarding
We are keen to improve the visitor experience, from sharing our acquired knowledge of the Cemetery and who is buried here, to helping people find their way around better on site. We propose to explore the opening of the West Cemetery for free-flow visitors in addition to our excellent guided tours. We would also like to provide better displays and interpretive material, as well as the creature comforts everyone expects nowadays: some food, drink and adequate toilets.

All this can be done while preserving the essential character of the place. We believe that evolution rather than revolution is the way forward. The next step will be to develop an implementation plan. This will set out how we intend to prioritise and deliver the actions set out in the conservation plan. This plan will be determined by a number of factors, including our ability to secure the necessary funding. We anticipate that we may also need help from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and private donors, as well as a new Act of Parliament if we are to manage our burial space more effectively.

Highgate Cemetery is one of the world’s finest garden cemeteries, and the policies in this Conservation Plan are intended to help keep it that way.

ADAM COOKE
Chair, Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust

Rare spider find a first for London

16 January 2013

A large, rare spider has been recorded for the first time in London — deep in tombs at Highgate Cemetery. As part of the Wild London Inclusive London project, staff at London Wildlife Trust have been working with the staff and local community of Highgate Cemetery since last summer. During a bat survey in December, Trust staff came across a population of large spiders in the vaults of the Egyptian Avenue at the Cemetery.

First London record

Interestingly, these orb weavers are the species Meta bourneti, the rarer of two species of Meta (Britain’s largest orb weavers). The identity of the spider was confirmed by Edward Milner, Spider Recorder at the London Natural History Society — and it is the very first record of the species in London!

An unusual lifestyle

Meta bourneti is particularly fascinating because, due to its origins as a cave-dweller (also known as a cave spider), it requires total darkness. Even an outdoor night time environment is too bright for it, so the spiders never leave the tombs. A sealed vault, on the other hand, provides a perfect breeding ground. Most of these vaults - walk-in tombs designed to house around four coffins — have not been opened for several years. And, because the structures date from the late 1830s, it’s quite possible the spiders discovered have lived in the tombs for at least 150 years without being detected.

One of the largest spiders in Britain

The find is made even more exciting by the spider’s large size. Most new spider records are for tiny species, but Meta bourneti measures over 30mm in diameter with leg-span included. Meta spiders are amongst the largest spiders found in Britain. In addition, the size of the population at Highgate Cemetery is substantial: A very rough initial estimate puts the number of adults at as many as a hundred. More research will now be carried out.

Tony Canning, London Wildlife Trust Community Outreach Officer for Camden and lead on the project, commented: “The discovery of this important spider population in the heart of London shows just how valuable cemeteries such as Highgate can be in providing refuges for wildlife.”

Background

During the various species surveys recently undertaken at Highgate Cemetery — and with the help of several expert specialists — London Wildlife Trust staff have discovered 227 species previously unrecorded at the site on London’s environmental records centre, Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL).

Meta spiders prey on small insects and woodlice. The females produce teardrop-shaped eggsacs, which hang suspended on a silk thread from the roof of their dwelling. When the spiderlings first emerge they are attracted to light, unlike the adults which are strongly repelled by light. This helps the spiderlings find new areas to colonise.

Meta bourneti also need constant temperatures and high levels of humidity. Elsewhere in the UK, these spiders can be found in sewers, old cellars and abandoned railway tunnels.

Thanks to the London Wildlife Trust.