World's Greatest Cemeteries

- We're here outside one of the most dynamic cities in the world, a place you've heard of, a place that writers have written about for centuries.

Welcome to one of the world's greatest cemeteries, Highgate Cemetery, just outside of London.

(gentle music) The World's Greatest Cemeteries hold more than mortal remains.

There are monuments to landscape, design, horticulture, and history.

In a world where differences are seen as dangerous, it's more important than ever that our history is as inclusive as possible.

I spent years investigating the lives of the dead, finding out all I can about extraordinary people who were outsiders in their own day, but still managed to make significant contributions to humankind.

Welcome to World's Greatest Cemeteries.

Highgate Cemetery established in 1839, 170,000 burials, grade one designation in the register of historic parks and gardens, a de facto nature reserve, and a permanent place in the legends and lore of Great Britain.

I caught up with Dr. Ian Dungavell, Highgate's, chief executive to get to the bottom of Highgate's mysterious past.

So Ian, thank you so much for letting us come.

- You're welcome.

It's a pleasure to have you here at Highgate cemetery.

- Tell me about the history of this place.

- This rather incredible location here on the slopes of Highgate Hill until the cemetery was opened in 1839, it was just paddock here, cows or sheep grazing under a tree.

It was quite rural.

It was away from the hustle and bustle of the city of London.

And that was for a good reason.

The cemetery took the place of the traditional churchyards, where people would have been buried.

They were very overcrowded, partly to do with the industrial revolution, the growth of population, and also due to the reluctance of the Church of England to provide additional burial grounds for the growing population.

It's one other reason as well though, people wanted somewhere which was secure, and free from people interfering with their graves.

So this new cemetery offered all of those things.

It offered a beautiful place.

- So when you come to a cemetery like this, one of the things that catches the eye, are the beautiful statues, and the longer you spend in a cemetery, the more you realize, hey, wait a minute.

I saw a statue like that.

So what's going on here?

You know, what are these statues about?

- They tended to be quite commonly repeated across cemeteries.

So there's a lot that you'll see in one century you've seen somewhere else.

So Highgate found in the early 18, in the mid 1830s, the architectural style then was classicism.

So you'll see lots of things with antique references.

Obelisks for example, which actually people are thinking of as Rome, I guess as much as Egypt, you'll see veiled urns going back to ancient Greece, where you had the cremated remains, kept in urns.

And then later on in the century, you'll get more Christian references.

So for example, the cross on a stepped base, the three steps said to represent faith hope and charity is the steps up to heaven.

And the Holy monogram, I H S, which looks a bit like a dollar sign.

why have they got dollar signs on their graves?

But actually is Latin for Jesus savior of man.

So there's more obviously religious style memorials tend to happen from the mid century onwards.

- Got it.

Great.

(gentle music) - Johanna Gibbons is founding partner of J and L Gibbons Landscape Architects, and a trustee of Open City.

I asked Johanna to come to Highgate and share her thoughts about the role historic cemeteries play in urban ecosystems.

- There are many different landscapes in the city.

In fact, the landscape underlays the whole city.

It's not the spaces in between.

It's the geology, it's the soils, it's the trees, it's the natural assets of a city.

And so it is absolutely fundamental part of our process of understanding the cycles of life, of our contact with nature, of our contact with our own history.

So it's this intersection of cultural and ecological inheritance, that is incredibly meaningful.

And because there's becomes such great places of nature conservation is a place where one can breathe and well, it's a garden of rest, but not just for those who are dead.

It's a garden of rest for those who visit as well.

- I asked Johanna, what is it about the design of great cemeteries that makes us want to spend time there while we're still alive.

- Here in Highgate, you know, a lot of people would come here and think it all just popped up by itself, but actually it arrived by intent.

And that intent was a design.

The site was very specifically selected because it had beautiful topography, wonderful views.

It had slopes that could be explored in terms of sinuous paths, places where you could create terraces, veteran trees that you could create magnificent features and then places where you could arrest water, hold it for reflection of both nature, and in terms of being a sort of peaceful place to be.

You know, the art is in how they're managed.

They're managed, it seems effortlessly, but I can tell you, this is a huge effort to keep a place like this looking so romantic, as a place where I think because we are complex, humanity is complex.

We love that sense of intrigue and discovery.

And also identity is like who we are.

Who's here, who's in the ground and who might be there tomorrow.

(gentle music) - The UK has contributed many great writers to the English language.

You might've heard of a few, Will Shakespeare, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, J R R Tolkien, Jane Austen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Virginia Wolf, Charles Dickens, and a few other unknowns.

Our next story is about a writer whose work brought him worldwide fame, a man who left England at the height of his powers, and then tragically passed away before his 50th birthday.

- Well, I'm here with Peter Mills who is a volunteer guide and a former history teacher.

- Indeed.

- Yeah, that's right.

And he is one of more popular guides here at Highgate.

And we're here to ask him about the grave of the gentlemen behind us, Douglas Adams.

Though, on the stone, it says writer, but I'm gonna let you tell us more about Douglas Adams.

- Well, Douglas Adams really is probably the most famous comedy science fiction writer this country's ever had.

He wrote, is most famous for a book called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

He wrote other things directed for television, wrote for radio and television, but it's the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that we really remember him for.

- Fantastic.

Well, let me ask you this.

Yeah, um right by his grave is the number 42.

Is that the plot number?

What is the significance?

- A lot of people think that we put that there.

We really didn't.

His fans put that there.

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there's a big experiment.

People on earth wants to know what's the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything.

So they build a massive computer and it takes billions of years.

And the answer is 42.

- Henry Flynn is another popular docent here at Highgate.

I asked him to share some of his encyclopedic knowledge about Douglas Adams.

- His.

Middle name is Noel Douglas Noel Adams.

And he used to joke that he was the first DNA to be discovered in Cambridge in 1952.

That's what the year he was born.

But also that is the year when Watson and Crick made the discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA.

And he went to Cambridge University, which is where he began his career.

- [Roberto] After college, there were several lean years when young Douglas was unable to make a living as a writer.

And then inspiration came at an unlikely place and time.

- He had been hitchhiking around Europe.

And he was in Innsbruck in Austria.

And it was getting late.

He was looking for somewhere to stay.

He didn't speak any German.

He couldn't encounter, he didn't encounter anyone who spoke any English.

So he was faced with a problem.

He bought few beers, got a bit drunk and just ended up asleep in a field.

And as the stars were coming out, he was sort of, blearily drifting off to sleep.

And in his hand was the Hitchhiker's guide to Europe.

And as he was drifting off to sleep, he was thinking someone really ought to write a Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, If there was one of those, I'd be set.

- [Roberto] Adam's got to work on his idea.

- He wrote the, a pilot radio script, which he pitched to BBC Radio 4 as well as the Doctor Who production office.

They liked it, but also Radio 4 liked it too.

So he was from having no work at all.

He was suddenly incredibly busy with another four novels, there were stage shows.

There was associated merchandise, a TV series in 1981.

- [Roberto] Hollywood started paying attention.

- So there was American interest in making hitchhikers movie.

It was something, it was in development how for a long time, but with work on the scripts and so forth, being an ongoing thing, it was just useful for Douglas to be involved in that answer to be site.

So he moved to, to California.

- [Roberto] There in LA, at the height of his career tragedy struck.

- He had something of an ironic death.

He died of a heart attack in a gym, which was a great, of course, a great tragedy.

He wasn't all that old.

He was only 49 and he left behind a load of devastated friends and family, but also fans.

Fans were absolutely, there was, it was a genuine within that kind of fan community, the genuine outpouring of grief for the fact that he died at such a young age.

Then there were so many more books he could have written he had so much more to give, so much more in him.

And it's such a shame that he died the way he did.

(somber music) - I'm now descending something like 20 feet into the famous Circle of Lebanon.

(gentle music) - Here, you'll find an inner circle of Egyptian style tombs from the 1830s and an outer circle built later in the classical style.

The ironic thing about the circle of Lebanon is that the mausoleums, which are ordinarily above ground are in fact below ground yet above the earth in this deep trench.

(gentle music) The name comes from a large majestic Cedar of Lebanon tree that reigned over the center for almost 200 years.

Unfortunately, the Cedar's condition deteriorated over the centuries and it had to be removed in 2019.

Do you remember that Cowboy movie, The Magnificent Seven when we were kids?

Well, London has its own Magnificent Seven.

I asked Johanna Gibbons to explain it.

- Yeah, The Magnificent Seven were a group of cemeteries that were set up in about 1830 as a result of the terrible situation of stacked graves happening in the city of London.

And so there was many entrepreneurs, Victorian entrepreneurs, not religious men, but entrepreneurs who felt that there needed to be a solution to this.

And they set out this idea of having around what was then the edge of London, seven, very large places to lay the dead.

And this was one of those seven.

And it's like a beautiful ring around London.

You can pick them up and they're great.

They're on the London Arch.

So you can actually walk from one to the other.

And so this is not just isolated in its beauty.

This is part of a fantastic resource of green infrastructure, if you like for Londoners, which is unique, because it has so much cultural heritage also embedded in it.

- A walking tour of London's Magnificent Seven sounds like a great hike, a history buff's delight, a gardener's dream, and an epic pub crawl.

Ah, just the ticket.

(gentle music) While researching this episode, I learned about an outstanding soldier named Walter Tull.

He's not buried at Highgate, but I wanted to take a couple of minutes to share his story with you.

To start, I met up with Stephen Bourne author of Black Poppies: Britain's Black Community and the Great War.

- So who was Walter Tull?

Walter Tull was a Black, British footballer who joined the British army at the outbreak of the first World War.

I don't think I've ever seen a black British soldier depicted in a movie in World War I.

Did Black Britons serve in the army in World War I?

- Black British men, and also men across the empire, Africa, the Caribbean were loyal to the British.

Marcus Garvey is on record at that time as saying to Jamaican men join up because if we join up and fight with the British, fight the enemy, maybe they will give us independence after the first World War.

- The truth is soldiers and workers from India, Africa, the Caribbean and China served in the Great War.

I also asked David Matthews, author of Voices of the Windrush Generation whose great uncle served in World War I for his take on Walter Tull's enduring legacy.

- What really marks Walter Tull out as a heroic individual is that he fought a number of tours in the first World War, was decorated, became the first black commissioned officer in the British Army and subsequently lost his life.

During the second tour of the Somme.

- Sadly, Walter Tull's remains were never recovered from battle.

But there are memorials to him around the UK.

- So he is memorialized.

He isn't forgotten at all.

- As a boy growing up in a military family, I idolized my dad and my brother, but also the brave soldiers, sailors and pilots who were depicted in movies, books, and TV.

But I don't recall seeing a soldier of color in any of those World War I stories.

I wish I had seen a movie about Walter Tull when I was a kid.

- He is not only a sporting hero of mine.

He is a historical British military, sort of hero of mine and should be a hero, not just to people like me, but to Britain's across the board.

- Ever wonder why cemeteries have gates, walls and fences?

I asked Ian Dungavell about that, and was surprised by his answer.

So this is the late eighteenth century?

- This is the late 18th century all the way through, right up until the 1840s.

- Tell me about the conditions in London.

There is the issue of them being unsanitary?

- They were very unsanitary.

So churchyards were absolutely disgusting places.

The bodies were buried so close to the surface that obviously the smell was ever present, but also there's accounts of people attending funerals slipping over because the body beneath them has only been covered by a couple of inches of soil.

Sometimes after a storm, the rain would wash away some of the soil on top and you would see body parts emerging from the ground.

So they were completely disgusting, but also there was the problem of finding space for the new burials.

So there were stories from sextons, the grave diggers, having to dismember the corpses that have been recently buried to create space for the next one.

The church yards weren't closed at least until 1852.

So that's the situation.

And don't forget as well.

There's a hefty trade in the recycling of things to do with graveyards in the 19th century.

So you're buried in the church yard, other people would be following on close behind.

What can I do with that coffin?

Fantastic firewood.

So there's accounts of people smelling the smoke, coming out of somebody's house knowing that was coffin wood that had been used for that.

'Cause its done so much.

Any metal that was buried with the coffin could be recycled.

The clothes sometimes would be removed or things that were buried with the deceased could be removed as well and sold.

That was a much worse crime than the one that most people were absolutely terrified of.

And that was their bodies themselves would be stolen.

- [Roberto] And what would it be done with the bodies?

- Well, there was a great shortage of corpses wanted by anatomy students who needed the practical expertise of cutting up the bodies.

So they had body snatchers who were on the lookout for freshly buried corpses that they could take back to sell to the anatomy schools for the students to practice on.

And they wanted freshly very corpses, you can imagine this is the days before refrigeration.

Those are gonna be pretty whiffy if they'd been there for a couple of days.

- [Roberto] My gosh!

there's that term Burke to Burke somewhere, right?

Because one of the doctors was named Burke or something.

- It was one of the grave robbers.

So that that's one of the most salacious stories from the 19th century, but the papers are regularly filled with horrific accounts.

It wasn't an abstract fear.

It was something which was really in people's minds.

And so when Highgate is built, there's 15 foot high brick walls around, there's police or retired policemen here day and night.

There's dogs patrolling the place, all to keep people reassured that your body is not gonna be stolen from here.

- When we think of the cemetery, the rural cemetery in particular with the high gates and the stone walls, it's not merely for decoration, is it?

- Not merely for decoration at all, but also they wanted to take you out from the crowded cities, right?

They were polluted, they were noisy.

They were overcrowded and they wanted to make death seem a bit more peaceful, If you like, and see you get the same thing in France at Pere Lachaise you've been to the idea of taking things out of the center of town.

- I've noticed this out of the city concept in places like Flushing, New York, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Hollywood, California, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

In instances where the historic cemetery is now in an urban setting, it probably wasn't when the cemetery was originally built in the 18 hundreds.

(enchanted playful music) Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez and Brad Pitt are some of today's celebrities.

19th century England had pop stars too.

Ironically celebrity culture is alive and well in historic cemeteries.

Here's Henry Flynn on who is winning the popularity contests at Highgate.

- So the most popular graves here at Highgate Cemetery, there are several who are, people come specifically to see various people.

First and foremost would be Karl Marx.

They come in tour groups, busloads of people come from all over the world.

They come to see Karl Marx and then they leave.

So he's a huge draw.

I believe the second most popular grave in terms of people to come to visit it is Douglas Adams.

Still attracts that attention to this day, just because his work was just so loved, but also on this side, just to mention this side, we've got George Eliot, the Victorian novelist, wrote various novels, including The Mill on the Floss.

We've got Patrick Caulfield who is an artist.

He's a little bit of a walk down there on the right.

Malcom McLaren.

The godfather of British punk rock.

He's down there on the left.

I mean, that's just the more modern, the 20th, 21st century celebrities.

- George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans an English novelist, translator, poet, and journalist, who was one of the Victorian era's leading authors.

- [Narrator] "In the early years of this century, such a linen Weaver named Silas Marner, worked at his vocation in a stone cottage that stood among the nutty hedge rows near the village of Raveloe."

Her more well-known works, include Silas Marner.

The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch.

She published under a man's name so her literary works would be taken more seriously.

She also worked professionally as an editor, critic and translator.

Evan's writings reflected her political leanings.

She supported Irish home rule and abolitionism.

Supported the union cause in the American Civil War and expressed doubts about organized religion.

Furthermore, she had a then scandalously public relationship with a married man for many years.

Albeit, he and his wife were already in an open marriage.

Even living with him and taking his name after he died.

But interest in her works faded toward the end of her life in 1880.

However, in the 20th century, influential writers like Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis, and Julian Barnes began to champion her books.

These days, film and television adaptations of her novels are bringing her entirely new audiences.

If you go to the UK, you might wanna check out this painting of her in the National Portrait Gallery or a collection of her artifacts at the Nuneaton Gallery and Museum in Northern Warwickshire.

Join us all season long as we travel to the world's greatest cemeteries, touring masterpieces of landscape, gardens and culture, while reliving dramatic stories about diverse historical figures.

- I will be speaking on behalf of the political arrangements of the working class and secular free education.

- We'll discover artistic designs, check out stunning vistas and uncover surprising facts about the past.

- Hello.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Roberto] London's Highgate cemetery.

- So it's a phenomenal ecological embracing of the urban environment.

- [Roberto] Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn.

Well, here at Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn is the grave of one of my childhood heroes.

His name is Leonard Bernstein and he was an American composer.

Famously, he did the music for West Side Story.

This is an interesting collection of artifacts tell us about this.

- So he, along with Leonard Bernstein, are the most visited, the most asked about people here at the cemetery.

And so on any given day, people will leave all sorts of tokens, whether it's pens or brushes.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.

- In spite of whatever she was going through.

She gave a hundred thousand percent every time she sang.

- All on World's Greatest Cemeteries.

I'm sorry to do this to you.

But when I first walked into the cemetery and I saw the beautiful old monuments, some of them, you know, a kilter and I saw the trees and the Ivy overgrowing, my first thought was booh!

I mean, you must attract people who see this place, not as a peaceful site of contemplation about the meaning of life, but more as like a Halloween stuff.

Can you talk about that?

- Yeah, It's all.

It's easy when you come here and you see the spooky ones think, oh, this is a spooky graveyard.

There's ghosts, there's vampires and all that sort of stuff.

When you also imagined that actually just last week, we've buried a child age six.

And next week we'll bury someone who's still alive today, but they're terminally ill, and I've just met them in the office that puts a different slant on how you experience things, which is one of the reasons I think it's really important for cemeteries to keep burying people and not to become these weirdo Victorian theme parks.

So we want to continue the focus on remembrance rather than on the spooky.

- Well, that's our visit to Highgate Cemetery in London.

Until next time.

you can find out more about this episode.

Just get in touch.

Or tell us about your favorite cemetery or historical figure at worldsgreatestcemeteries.com (bright gentle music)