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Those of you old enough to remember TV presenter Jeremy Beadle and his shows Beadle's About (1986-1996, theme tune above, obvs) and Game for a Laugh (1981-1985) will know that since 2008 when he died he's very much not been about. Unless, that is, you happen to visit Highgate Cemetery where Jeremy Beadle is interred. Surprisingly the burial plot of Karl Marx is a more popular attraction. Who'd have thought it?
It's a jocular, and not entirely serious, start to my account of London by Foot's third (in a series of three) walks around the Magnificent Seven graveyards of London and that's because, despite being almost constantly in the presence of death, it was a thoroughly enjoyable day and, for me personally, a real tonic following a couple of weeks of being really down in the dumps.
Following our walks in the South East (West Norwood and Nunhead) and the West (Brompton and Kensal Green) of London it was time to cover the final three of the seven stretching from Tower Hamlets (or Bow if you'd prefer) in the East to Abney Park (Stoke Newington) and Highgate in the north. It was due to be a long one (fifteen miles) and, due to Highgate's closing time of 5pm, we'd need to set off early to cover this ground and still have time for a drink, something to eat, and to actually spend some time in the graveyards.
So, understandably, and also taking into account family duties and holidays, it was just me, Shep, and Pam who convened at Mile End tube at 9am on a pleasingly sunny Saturday morning. More would join us later but for Tower Hamlets, a very short walk away, it would be just the three of us.
Tower Hamlets opened in 1841 and during WWII it was bombed five times. Both chapels were damaged and shrapnel wounds can be seen on some graves. Notable internees (and they're not that notable) include:-
Charlie Brown, publican of The Railway Tavern in London's original Chinatown in Limehouse. The pub was full of so many curiosities it became a tourist attraction. Sounds like The Black Boy Inn in Winchester.
Charles Jamrach - PT Barnum's animal supplier.
Dr Rees Ralp Llewellyn, who performed the autopsy on Jack the Ripper's first victim Mary Ann Nichols.
Hannah Maria Purcell, widow of the HMS Bounty's cartographer.
John Northey who seems to be most famous for dying in the 1878 Princess Alice disaster.
Pretty lame claims to fame all round and the rest of the graveyard is fleshed out with many who died in the Blitz and the 1943 Bethnal Green disaster, and the final resting places of Carthusian monks, Barnardo's orphans, and French gold refiners. Despite lacking the glitz and glamour of some of the other cemeteries it was a quiet, and pleasant, place to walk around. Less orderly than Brompton, less wild than Nunhead, a 'just right' Goldilocks cemetery.
We left where we came in and headed straight to Mile End Park where hundreds of runners were taking part in a Park Run (reminding me how much my running has been neglected in recent years). One chap had a different idea though. Can to his side he was taking a mid-morning nap on a park bench in the sunshine. Not the last of the day's great juxtapositions.
Mile End Park was built on former industrial land created by WWII bomb damage and was extended as recently as 1999 with the addition of Piers Gough's eco-friendly green pedestrian bridge (I remember making a special trip to see it at the time). A bridge we might have passed over had there not been so many runners on it.
Instead we followed the Regent's Canal, past graffiti, painted daisies, an impressive gasholder, and, as always, boats of all shapes and sizes. We passed under Twig Folly Bridge and walked alongside Wennington Green looking across to the boarded up Palm Tree pub where elderly crooners used to aggressively amuse themselves on Saturday evenings not so long ago.
Looking at the juxtaposition (see!) of weeping willow and tower block and seeing the happy faces of boaters was making me a lot more cheerful than I'd been just twelve hours before that. We crossed the Hertford Union Canal (which leads to the Lea and TADS walkers may remember from a November 2016 walk from Hackney to Walthamstow) and entered Victoria Park.
The initial plan had to been to get a drink in one of the nice pubs that abut the park but that was when we thought we'd arrive at about 1pm. The early start meant it was just gone 10am so instead we headed straight to the lake, Shep getting his fill of waterfowl and all of us enjoying the rainbow that had been created by the fountain, and the Pavilion Cafe.
Victoria Park, the People's Park, opened in 1845 and was laid out by James Pennethorne (a pupil of John Nash - Regent's Park). There's a gate named after 16c Bishop of London Edmund Bonner (a man instrumental in Henry VIII's schism with Rome but who later reconciled himself with Catholicism) and there are also replicas of the Dogs of Alcibiades. Alicibiades being a prominent Athenian statesman who fell from favour after the Spartans defeated Athens in the Pelopennesian War of 431-404BC.
Not sure why a defeated Athenian statesman spoke to the good burghers of East London but at least I learnt why it was nicknamed the People's Park. That name took hold from the 1880s onwards when it introduced many East End kids to swimming (public baths, prior to that, were simply washrooms) as well as giving them a green space. It soon became a popular spot for rallies, meetings, and political agitation - exceeding even Regent's Park. There were numerous Speaker's Corners and William Morris and Annie Besant drew the largest crowds.
During WWII Vicky Park was mainly closed to the public and became one huge Ack-Ack (anti-aircraft) site targetting the Luftwaffe looping NW after bombing Docklands. As on Peckham Rye, prison camps were erected.
In 1978 the park became a kind of home for Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League and saw huge concerts featuring The Clash, Steel Pulse, Jimmy Pursey, X-Ray Spex, and The Tom Robinson Band. Southall's Misty in Roots played on a lorry leading the parade. Later that year Brockwell Park saw Aswad, Stiff Little Fingers, and Elvis Costello play and in Manchester the anti-racism gig featured The Fall, The Buzzcocks, Steel Pulse, and Graham Parker and the Rumour.
The cafe's pretty hipsterish now (as most things in the area are) and full of millennials eating smashed avo and looking healthy. You can't pay by cash but you can enjoy a tea, coffee, and a pastry while feeling the gentle breeze, and odd drop of blown water from the fountain, on your face. I felt perfectly content sat there with great views and great friends.
But we couldn't stop long as we had people to meet and places to see. Past the pagoda and the aforementioned Athenian mutt, much repaired from some years back but still hardly pristine, we were soon back on the canal and when we reached Cambridge Heath we came up to road level to meet Dena who'd walked up from Bethnal Green.
A few bridges after that we came off the canal for good and headed up Kingsland Road through Haggerston and Dalston (spotting Shep's and Pamela's own outlets - alas me and Dena had nothing in our name though a cactus shop named PRICK might have worked for me) before meeting Colin and Patricia at Dalston Junction and, almost immediately, popping in to Greggs for a vegan sausage roll or three between us.
These beauties are usually delicious (and just £1 each) but some complained the Dalston branch had undercooked the pastry. Perhaps we should have gone to The Pantry (eggless cake specialists from Ilford) instead!?
We continued directly north out of Dalston and through Stoke Newington High Street, past a mosque that's been converted into some sort of Turkish butcher shop but still looks pretty amazing, and eventually turned left into Abney Park.
Abney Park became a cemetery in 1840 and is named after Sir Thomas Abney (Lord Mayor of London from 1700-1701, a very brief reign) who once owned the manor of Stoke Newington. It's a non-denominational cemetery inspired by American burial ideas. There's an Egyptian Revival frontage with hieroglyphics signifying "Abode of the Mortal Part of Man" which upset Augustus Pugin who felt it was too radical a departure from Christian Gothic design.
Imagine having the bandwidth to be upset by that! Abney Park draws on the Scottish botanist John Loudon's concept of the 'gardenesque' and it's a large and interesting place to have an aimless wander around. It's two most notable burials, there are many music hall stars lost to time, are William Booth (1829-1912) and his wife Catherine Booth (1829-1890), the founders of the Salvation Army.
On top of that there's a Commonwealth War Graves area for WWI & II, a life sized lion statue, a 'Cross of Sacrifice, and, as ever it seems, a Dissenting Chapel. Abney Park featured in the video of Amy Winehouse's Back to Black and is apparently very popular with steampunks. We didn't see any. Perhaps there was a steampunk festival on in Whitby or something.
We stayed for a respectable amount of time and then came out on to Stoke Newington Church Street (the High Street's younger, smarter brother) and soon entered into Clissold Park. I'd not been there for years but I once saw a man dressed as a parrot singing for a thrash punk band at a festival to raise awareness for homelessness so I had good memories.
It was prettier than I remembered. A little swimming pool saw a debate on the pronouncation of lido before we said hello to the goats, deer, and birds and looked across to Clissold House. Formerly Paradise House it was built in the eighteenth century for Jonathan Hoare, a City merchant/Quaker/anti-slavery campaigner. It was later passed to the Anglican/Swedenborgian priest Augustus Clissold from where, you'd assume, it took its name.
There are said to be terrapins in the lake and the Capital Ring (a future walking project we've been discussing) passes through it. Another future walk plan is along the New River and that too passes through Clissold Park. We crossed over it and headed to the far side of the park, Shep stopping to watch a game of football.
The next bit was to be a lengthy zig-zag stretch of busy, urban roads that'd take us from Clissold Park to Tufnell Park but at least there was another Greggs vegan sausage roll to greet us and when we reached Tufnell Park, via the roads of Blackstock, Seven Sisters, and Holloway, I found out the route I'd planned passed right in front of the flat Dena shares with another of our occasional walkers, Sanda.
Sanda leaned out the window for a brief chat before we continued on. We passed the Boston Arms (I'd seen Euros Childs there six years back but back in the eighties I'd been to see That Petrol Emotion with Shep there and we'd both been blown away by the support band My Bloody Valentine (the other support The Young Gods not so much) to the extent he still raves about that gig now) and via a street that looked as if out of a cinematic reimagining of ye olde London towne we came out by The Southampton Arms, a pub I'd spent last New Year's Eve in with Valia and a few of her friends.
We sat in the small suntrap beer garden and I had a Natural Selection (others opted for Tropical Deluxe). It's a lovely pub with a huge range of real ales and often to be found playing reggae. The only downside was the smell of meat cooking (our group was 83% vegetarian and/or vegan) and the fact we could only have one pint because we needed to be at Highgate before it closed and to meet Eamon who, out of the blue, had announced he was there!
Up a steep hill, especially after a pint and two 'sausage' rolls, and past some ludicrously expensive looking mock-Tudor gated communities we finally reached the entrance for Highgate. Such is its star status Highgate is the only one of the Magnificent Seven you have to pay to go in. The East Cemetery insists you take an expensive seventy minute, booked in advance, guided tour, so we stuck to the West side which was a pretty reasonable, all things considered, £4 per person.
Clearly the two most popular questions on arrival are "where is Karl Marx's grave?" and "where are the toilets?". A handy sign saved work for the ticket guy. Highgate opened in 1839 and was designed by Stephen Geary who is also reported to have designed London's first gin palace. It has a wealth of Gothic tombs and buildings and some quite unusual ones too - as we'll see - but it's also the alleged site of the Highgate Vampire.
A 'grey figure' spotted in the late sixties/seventies during a period of graveyard vandalism (Marx's grave still gets the odd going over). One Sean Manchester told the Ham & High, the local paper, that he believed a 'King Vampire of the Undead', a medieval nobleman, and a black magic practitioner from Romania had arrived in England in a coffin in the eighteenth century. He'd been interested in Highgate anyway but modern Satanists had encouraged that interest and soon dead foxes were found with no explanation and order was decreed that it was illegal to 'stake the vampyr'. On Friday 13th March 1970 a Vampire Hunt was held and the police were unable to quell the mob.
The vampire story remains believed by some, discredited by others, to this day but the cemetery's burials are hard to dispute as is the sheer number of well known names. The wilder East Cemetery, which we didn't go in of course, holds Beryl Bainbridge, Jacob Bronowski, John Singleton Copley, David Devant (the original one, not the nineties minor pop star who took his name), Michael Faraday, Lucian Freud, Stephen Geary (yes, the designer of the place), Stella Gibbons, Radclyffe Hall, Bob Hoskins, Georgiana Houghton, Alexander Litvinienko, and George Michael.
With Marx and Beadle on the West side are:-
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880, author of Middlemarch, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, and Daniel Deronda.
Paul Foot (1937-2004) - investigative journalist, SWP member, and Michael Foot's nephew.
Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) - Alexandria born historian.
Bert Jansch (1943-2011) - Scottish folk musician and a rather excellent one at that.
Roger Lloyd-Pack (1944-2014)
Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010)
Ralph Miliband (1924-1994) - Sociologist and Marxist father of Ed and David.
Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) - Australian artist.
Max Wall (1908-1990)
Colin St John Wilson (1922-2007) - Architect of the British Library.
We walked round slowly, we found many of the celebrity graves and took photos, others were remarkable for their design, some for their names (Adrian Marriage sounds like something from a Martin Amis novel), and it was notable how international the selection of the interred is, showing what a remarkable multicultural and welcoming place Britain is. Or once was.
Near Marx's grave, built way bigger than he'd ever requested, there was a man still grieving near a freshly dug plot showing that this, despite the tourists, history, and myths, is still a working graveyard.
That didn't stop me having favourites. It was nice to see pens on Douglas Adams' plot (and a '42' marker) and a few more (less though) on Alan Sillitoess. McLaren's death mask was a bit odd, the piano grave of a now long forgotten pianist impressed (Eamon joked he wasn't a piano player but had died when a piano fell on him), and though we'd never heard of Geoff Upton his afterlife boast of "CANVEY ISLAND TO THE CZECH REPUBLIC" made us curious.
Beadle's grave claims him as writer before presenter which is pushing it a bit but we have to feel for a man whose family possibly had to feed the Golightlys at the wake of his funeral. The best grave of all though, perhaps the best I've ever seen or ever will see, was that of the brilliant artist Patrick Caulfield.
The letters D E A D spelled out in aesthetically pleasing and geometric manner almost inviting you to climb this self-made Jacob's Ladder. It made several of us burst out laughing which isn't what you expect at a graveyard, eh. Fair play to Caulfield, bringing joy to people in life and continuing to do it in death.
The bells were ringing and it was our time to leave. Luckily just the cemetery, not this mortal coil. We passed through one last park, Waterlow, before it was time for drinks and food. Waterlow Park is named after another former Lord Mayor of London, Sir Sidney Waterlow and has had a Mott the Hoople song written about it.There's a couple of nice lakes and Lauderdale House, built 1582.
Lauderdale House was built for Richard Martin (yep, another former Lord Mayor of London) and later inherited by the Earl of Lauderdale. In 1666 it was visited by Charles II, Samuel Pepys, and Nell Gwyn (threesome I reckon) and in 1760 it converted to its present neoclassical sign. 1782 saw John Wesley preach there.
I'd hope to take people for a drink in the Boogaloo (where I once ran into Shane MacGowan) but they were hosting a loud and £8 entry swing dancing class so we continued up to The Woodman, a pub I'd not visited for a while but one that has certainly had a refurb. They now employ a chef from The Ivy.
Not that we were eating. We just stayed for a couple of drinks (although the table service could have pushed us dangerously close to having more) and a good old heated debate about which Fall and David Bowie songs are best before heading back towards New Bengal Bertie's for some very tasty Indian grub and a brace of Cobras.
I had paneer jalfrezi, pulao rice, and a chapati (one and a half poppadums too of course, this time I even indulged in the lime pickle) and it was delicious and, unlike some previous occasions, I wasn't too drunk to savour and enjoy it. The whole experience was only soured by the very friendly waiter's ill advised decision, after the mints, to treat us to a couple of racist jokes that were both poor in both taste and quality.
I note he waited until we'd paid. We all walked down, under the notorious Suicide Bridge, to Archway. Pam, Colin, and Patrica hopped on the tube and Dena, Shep, and I continued back to Tufnell Park. We said goodbye to Dena and Shep and I had one last drink, for old time's sake, in the none more North London Irish Boston Arms. There was a fairly dreadful duo knocking out Irish standards but the beer was cheap and it was good to debrief.
We departed at the tube station and I was home and in bed just gone midnight. I went to bed happier than I had done in nearly a fortnight and woke up in a better mood too. That's not what graveyards can do for you but it is what walking, fresh air, laughter, and friendship can do for you. I'd really enjoyed administering, curating, and running this series of walks and would like to thank everyone who attended for coming along (special thanks to Shep and Pam for the photos used in this piece) and hope to see you all again very soon. I know, in many cases, I will. In the meantime there's still room to cram in one last London by Foot walk before the year is out. Watch this space.
Thanks to Shep and Pam for some of the photographs. Though most of them are mine ;-)
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