Library of the dead

Highgate Cemetery, created as a fashionable resting place for wealthy Victorian dead, is a veritable who's who of London's great and good. PETER ROSS roams the avenues of this most atmospheric necropolis

-  PETER ROSS

Highgate Cemetery isn't in London it is London. It stands for the city in its splendour, its tangible history Hits London. I stands for and, most of all, because it is a place of story. Some of the capital's most dramatic lives have their full-stops here.

You might, for example, follow the example of many visitors and head straight to the east part of the cemetery and the tomb of Karl Marx, with its great leonine bust (left). Or you could follow a winding path into the trees through the western side and seek the grave of Lizzie Siddal, the artist and model whom John Everett Millais painted as the drowned Ophelia, and who died in 1862, aged just 32. When she was exhumed seven years later so that her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, could retrieve a book of poems he wished to publish, the coffin was, it is said, full of her beautiful red hair - it had continued to grow after death and glowed in copper coils by the light of a graveside fire.