Highgate Cemetery

This cemetery in North London was one of our field trip destinations. In the early nineteenth century, London was running out of room to bury its dead, so seven cemeteries were built on what were then the outskirts of the city. Highgate is the most famous; it's the final resting place for both George Eliot and George Michael, along with Karl Marx, Michael Faraday, Christina Rossetti, and many rich, poor, and in between residents of the city whose names are remembered only by those who loved them.

As the cemetery filled up, profits went down and by the 1930's large sections were abandoned and overgrown. Restoration work has been ongoing since the 1970's, but in between the grand Victorian monuments there are sections where plain tombstones whose weathered names and dates can no longer be read lean into each other for support in the middle of thick foliage.

It was appropriately drizzly for most of our visit—gray skies, gray stone, which made the vivid greens of the grasses and trees almost otherworldly. So I redid many of the photos I took in black and white, or with filters that made them look old and faded. I'm happy with how they turned out, and that's not something my stubborn perfectionism lets me say very often.