Volunteers at Highgate Cemetery spend many hours maintaining the acres of burial ground, looking at graves and researching their stories

IT contains decades of history and thousands of individual stories – Highgate Cemetery plays numerous roles that go beyond final resting places and a space for the living to remember.

The cemetery’s former chairman, Martin Adeney, has seen how the Victorian burial ground must balance demands. Now he has published a diary kept while he helped steer the famous site through some of the biggest challenges in its history.

Martin was appointed chair in 2019 and set out to shape its future via a Parliamentary Bill: the cemetery needed a change in the law to allow graves to be reused. He felt it would be an interesting process, so began to keep a note of his day-to-day dealings as chair. And then the pandemic struck, adding a layer of complexity.

Martin, a former BBC and Observer journalist, became involved with the trustees via his voluntary roles at the Highgate Society.

“I have previously kept a diary when I have been working on something I feel is of interest – for example, when I covered the Miners’ Strike for the BBC,” he says.

“The Bill seemed to me to be unusual. There are normally only two or three private members’ Bills each year. I felt it was worth taking a note of. Then came Covid – a once in a lifetime event.”

The cemetery had been open since1839 and was “threatened with the decay and ravages of nature, while struggling to meet the shifting demands of contemporary society. And, crucially, running out of space for new burials,” he writes.

The list of burials is a roll call of the great and good: Karl Marx, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, George Michael, Lucien Freud and Jonathan Miller lie among 170,000 others.

And its architecture reflects design: from Classical to Gothic, Egyptian to Modernist, gravestones and memorials are rich and varied. “It is a beautiful place to spend time in,” he reflects. “It is quiet. I just love walking around and thinking of all the people here. The archi­tecture is remarkable.”

As chairman, Martin could explore the stories of those buried.

The tomb of Karl Marx

“Tucked away are our archives and what would be, had we the space to display it, our museums collection,” he wrote in his journal on Thursday January 23 2020.

They include bound burial volumes.

“The locations of plots are recorded on hand­written maps, though in some cases they are less than precise,” he says.

The collection holds Victorian accessories to funeral rites, from tokens given to mourners to full funeral outfits.

“One of the sad things I find is that often the inscriptions have worn away,” he says. “But there are always things being discovered. Some volunteers spend a lot of time looking at graves and researching their stories.”

In the days leading up to lockdown, Martin recalled one walk he took. “Taking a map, I headed for an area I have not often traced,” he writes. “I go past Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen… up to a striking sarcophagus topped by the dramatic winged figure of Lux Perpetua.

“As my eye runs over the casket I find that, etched in one corner, is a short but heartbreaking mention of a 16-year-old boy, Ben Tilley Hall, who died of exposure in the wreck of the barque Earls­court, in 1886. I wonder what lies behind it.”

Such inscriptions cannot help but prompt further questions for the curious.

“To my surprise, I discovered a full account in the South Wales Echo at the time,” he writes.

Ben was the son of the woman originally buried in the grave. “He had gone to sea as an officer apprentice, and this was his very first voyage.”

The ship was heading from South Wales to Australia. Disaster struck soon after leaving Newport: the ship’s navigator made an error and the captain had to run the ship aground. The crew climbed the rigging to wait to be rescued, but poor Ben died of exposure, in the arms of his cousin, the ship’s second mate.

Preserving the past also means preparing for the future, and today proposals to add a new building for gardeners to use has sparked objections from grave owners. Martin faced a mixture of support, curiosity and fears when the Parliamentary Bill was publicised.

“The cemetery depends on two income streams: the sale of graves, and visitors,” he says.

Martin Adeney with his parliamentary paper

“In order to keep going, it needs money and we are running out of graves. Almost all the ground is covered in graves. There is simply no space left. We could pack up as a working cemetery, which would have a lot of impact. Once somewhere stops being a ‘living’ cemetery, it can become something more like a park, and we wanted to remain a special sanctuary.”

Other cemeteries, taken on by local authorities, have the right to reuse graves, as does the Church of England. But Highgate needed to tweak the law to ensure they could look at where more space could be created.

Then came Covid. “We tried to stay open,” he recalls. “We offered free entry. The Heath was hideously overcrowded and the cemetery could offer much-needed space.

“We had to keep check­ing guidelines ­– they were often changing –  and did not directly refer to cemeteries. We were not a park, or a place of entertainment. We decided to open at certain times for grave owners.”

As well as balancing the needs of families, furlough staff, and secure the cemetery, Martin found himself called upon to help with unexpected issues.

One such moment came when a strange sight greeted people heading up Swains Lane. An immediate neighbour’s home was set to be rebuilt on what was once cemetery land. They left a collection of mannequins propped up against a fence. It looked like a jumble of naked bodies. “It is all a bit shocking until you realise what they are,” he writes.

Later that week, the mannequins had tumbled over. “The result is unsettling – bodies waving arms and legs in a cadaverous grey pile-up by the cemetery chapel… just at the moment when stories are appearing about the problems undertakers are having with the storage of bodies because of the pandemic.”

Martin stepped down as chair two years ago. Current arguments over plans to create a building in an area called the Mound for gardeners has highlighted the careful line the trustees have to tread.

“I hope a solution can be found,” he says of the controversy, which has seen some grave owners threaten to exhume their loved ones and take legal action against the cemetery.

“The reason it has arisen is there is no space in the cemetery that is not covered with graves, and it is difficult to know where you can put the things you need to keep the cemetery going.”

• Grave Concerns. By Martin Adeney. Troubador Books, £13.99