Take a stroll through the old, western section of London’s Highgate cemetery, and you will be surrounded by motifs of 19th-century mourning. A Gothic cross, a weeping angel, an urn partly covered with a shroud. These are the symbols we have come to expect from any well-to-do site of British burial. Yet another world lies hidden among this kingdom of the dead, one that speaks to the fashions and fascinations of the early Victorian era – trends that crop up in burial grounds across the country.
On a steep sloping path that forks from one of Highgate’s main thoroughfares, there stands an almighty gate, flanked by a pair of crumbling obelisks. Its four pillars are carved with lotus buds, which once held aloft an arch emblazoned with a winged sun disc (said to represent the immortal spirit). Behind this dramatic façade lies a shadowy passageway that was originally a tunnel, where tombs decorated with the names of their occupants existed in near total darkness.
This is the Egyptian Avenue, a dramatic, exoticised crypt that leads to the equally breathtaking Circle of Lebanon. This shining jewel of the Egyptian Revival movement was first unveiled in 1839. Such an elaborate ode to pharaonic burial was viewed as nigh on blasphemous by some, yet the confluence of archaeological obsession and a blossoming commercial internment industry proved fertile ground for such pageantry.
It is fair to say that Egyptomania had already taken hold of Britain by the time the avenue was built. Napoleon had already documented his invasion of Egypt in 1798, via a widely distributed visual chronicle that included meticulously drawn flora, monuments and architecture. Meanwhile, the Grand Tour was a well-established rite of passage for many gentlemen (and a few women), who travelled to the great sites of antiquity. Various excavations – which would be more accurately described as desecrations – of ancient tombs saw huge caches of treasured objects, including colossal statues, masks and even sarcophagi, arrive on British shores. Soon the influence of the region’s ancient peoples took hold across fashion, literature and architecture, with the imagination further kindled by public exhibitions.
One such show took place at the aptly named Egyptian House on Piccadilly, which was a kind of pastiche constructed to chime with the ancient icons displayed inside. According to Ian Dungavell, chief executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, it probably served as inspiration for Stephen Geary’s design of the avenue. ‘He was a designer, architect and inventor, who was more concerned with building a spectacle than historical accuracy,’ he says. Dungavell also points out that, as one of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ park cemeteries, Highgate was first and foremost a business.
These enormous sites were built on what was once the outskirts of the city, to solve the issue of massively overcrowded churchyards. They were run by private companies, which were always looking for ways to dazzle prospective buyers, leading to a more secularised attitude towards grave adornment. ‘The cemetery company advertised the avenue as an opportunity to experience “incredible Egyptian architecture”,’ says Dungavell, ‘which led to enormous crowds that required police attendance.’
Highgate was not the only park cemetery to be touched by the allure of ancient Thebes. At Kensal Green, several instances of Egypt-inflected monuments still stand, but Andrew Ducrow’s flamboyant crypt surely takes the crown. It features a rather vulgar mismatch of ancient styles, including sphinxes, palm leaves, uraeus (ancient serpents of supreme power), phoenixes and shell-shaped acroteria. Ducrow was a showman, known as the ‘colossus of equestrians’ for the daring feats of horsemanship he performed in circuses across Europe. Fittingly, this burial site was envisaged by his stage designer.
Other examples are found at Brompton in west London. A great mausoleum proudly dominates the meeting point of four paths and features tapered sides and cavetto cornices that are strongly reminiscent of ancient sepulchres, along with a distinctly decorated architrave (an even more elaborate specimen is the Kilmorey Mausoleum, first erected in Brompton, now in St Margaret’s in Richmond). This is the final resting place of Hannah Courtoy, a wealthy woman who counted the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi the Younger among her friends. He designed her tomb, yet his own grave is more austere. It is found only a few steps away: a simple headstone lists family names and his position as a ‘sculptor, traveller and archaeologist’ as well as ‘curator of the Sir John Soane Museum’. A nod to his scholarship is found in an engraved vision of Anubis, the god of funerary rites and guide to the underworld.
Bonomi also left his imprint on Abney Park, a member of the Seven in Stoke Newington, east London. He designed what is arguably the most historically accurate ode to Egypt found among the group, in the form of the eastern entrance. It features a set of relatively understated pillars with decorated capitals, as well as a gatehouse festooned with a sun disc. Perhaps the most striking detail, however, is a statement written in hieroglyphs, inviting visitors to pass through ‘The gates of the abode of the mortal part of man’.
This erudite allusion to the afterlife tells us something of why the Georgians and Victorians looked to ancient Egyptian burial for guidance, beyond simply mimicking the motifs to make an aesthetic statement. As the academic Michelle Keeley-Adamson explains: ‘Society was enamoured by the way the Egyptians honoured their dead and prepared for an eternal afterlife. It is also tied up with ideas of Empire, of absolute power, which is what building monuments is all about.’ Alexander, Tenth Duke of Hamilton, was so captivated that on his death he was embalmed, mummified and placed in a sarcophagus from the Ptolemaic period.
There was, however, a contradiction at play. ‘This society was very concerned with the desecration of the corpse, yet they didn’t afford these ancient sites and bodies the same respect,’ Keeley-Adamson explains. ‘Beyond displacing these sacred objects, there were awful events like mummy “unrollings”, which were an obscene spectacle.’
Even Giovanni Belzoni, the showman-turned-archaeologist celebrated for his excursions in Edfu, Abu Simbel and the Valley of the Kings, committed bizarre violations. On discovering the sarcophagus of Seti I, he scratched his name into the richly inscribed alabaster, before selling his treasure to Sir John Soane after the British Museum refused to pay his desired fee.
Soane held candle-lit receptions for guests to view the casket (it is still on view today), which again points to the mystical allure these funerary articles held for such audiences. This fixation also carried over to visions of pyramids, which often held arcane associations. ‘There seems to be links between the adoption of pyramids and notions of the devil,’ says Keeley-Adamson, who points to the mausoleum of ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller (an arts benefactor and avid supporter of slavery) in East Sussex, and William Mackenzie (a prolific gambler) in Liverpool. Both erected impressive pyramids with their bodies buried sitting upright, as if awaiting a satanic visitation.
While these tombs are undoubtedly outliers, plans were afoot to build more ambitious versions of the ancient form. In the 1830s, architect Thomas Willson proposed a necropolis in the form of a colossal pyramid that would cover 18 acres, rise 94 storeys and hold five million bodies. The proposed location? On top of Primrose Hill. The idea proved too much for even the most radical businessmen, and the park cemeteries won the day.
