We had a fantastic afternoon going around Highgate [and Hampstead] today [bank holiday]. We took the paid tour around the west graveyard, a first for both my wife and myself [who’ve clocked up about 15 years of London living and working between us]. If you are ever in town, do it: It is fascinating. Learn about Victorian Londoners in the 1860s too poor to bury an elderly relative, whom they propped up in the corner of a house with 60 people living in it. They had this poor dead bloke in the living room for a fruity 8 weeks over the summer. Yum.

I was gutted as in the preamble, the spry lady who introduced the tour guide said, ‘no big cameras’. I asked her again on the way in and she said something along the lines of ‘be discreet, and sensitive to the fact that it’s an actively used graveyard.’ There are 180,000 people buried in both sections. This came out quite nicely:

though I ended up being pretty rapid, snatching photos with my 10-22mm. On the east side, where you have to take a photo of this:

[I’ll come back to this. The cropping is annoying: I can’t keep all of the text with the Big Man’s head in the right part of the image.] But I think this really says it all:

And a couple more: