Karl Marx Grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery Sparks Controversy Over High Prices and Funerary Recycling

The image of London’s Highgate Cemetery, taken on July 16, 2023, shows the grave of Karl Marx. (Photo by Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) (Anadolu via Getty Images)

The decision to charge £25,000equivalent to about $31,700, for the right to be buried next to the German revolutionary Karl Marx in it London Highgate Cemetery has generated a great stir in British public opinion.

The Guardian newspaper said that Marx would tremble in his grave if he found out that the resting place of his remains was being used as part of a capitalist marketing strategy to increase the income of the necropolis, located in an exclusive area in the north of the capital of the United Kingdom.

The cemetery’s chief executive, Ian Dungavell, has told the British press that the cemetery needs new burials to continue being a living heritage and not a relic.

But space was running out and it was no longer possible to continue reducing the paths to expand the capacity of the cemetery by almost 15 hectares y 53,000 installmentswhere they are buried 173.000 personas.

The idea of ​​“renovating” the plots gained momentum after the National Lottery allocated Highgate some $127,000 to start the work of conservation and landscaping of the popular place that is visited by thousands of tourists a year, in search of the tomb of Marx and other famous people such as George Eliot, the renowned English author of the 19th century.

But that donation represents a tiny part of the cemetery renovation project which will take seven years and cost about 22 million dollars.

Half of the cemetery’s income will come from the sale of new graves. Since the room no longer has space to expand into, they will do a kind of funerary recycling, in which old graves will be cleared to allow for new burials. The other half will come from the collection of entrance fees from visitors, who pay by credit card some 15 dollars for walking among the dead.

The renovation will be made possible by the passing of the Highgate Cemetery Act in 2022, which will affect about 500 ancient tombs, with burials over 75 years old, whose tombstones are not maintained and where it has not been possible to trace the relatives of the deceased, probably because they are already dead. Some of them have not had any activity since the 1870s.

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Cemetery administrators have already begun a public notice campaign to inform about redevelopment plans and grave owners. They have until July 2024 to object to its reuse.

For graves whose owners remain silent, cleaning will involve relocating the oldest remains to a greater depth to allow the new deceased was buried higher up. This is a type of funeral condominium in which the mourners who paid most recently will have the privilege of having their loved one’s coffin closest to the surface.

Another view of London’s Highgate Cemetery, built in 1839 due to the insufficiency of London church cemeteries in Victorian times. (Photo by Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) (Anadolu via Getty Images)

History of the Magnificent Seven

Highgate was built in 1839 on the outskirts of the city and was part of a group of Victorian cemeteries known as the “Magnificent Seven”, along with Kensal Green, Brompton, Nunhead, Abney Park, Tower Hamlets y West Norwood.

The need to create garden cemeteries was due to London’s population explosion in the first half of the 20th century, in which the city’s population went from one million inhabitants in 1800 to 2.3 million in 1850.

The overcrowding of parish cemeteries caused epidemics of dangerous diseases like cholera because the decomposition of the bodies reached the water supply.

This led to the parliamentary approval in 1832 of a bill that authorized the construction of a series of cemeteries private gardens to the outskirts of the big city to relieve pressure on urban cemeteries.

Unfortunately, by the 1960s most were in a serious state of neglect. Weeds and bushes destroyed the tombstones and catacombs, until they were acquired by the town councils and maintained by a group of volunteers.

Highgate Cemetery is owned by the charitable foundation Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trustwhich was established in 1975 and became fully owned in 1981.

famous neighbors

The dead are not exempt from the laws of the market, so anyone who dreams of resting in peace among the English elite should hurry to buy some of the expensive plots that are freed up during the “renovation.”

One of the tombs that arouses the greatest interest among visitors is that of George Eliot, who was really called Mary Ann Evans but he used a male pseudonym to ensure the publication of his works.

Evans defied the conventions of the time by living together without marrying George Henry Lewes, a fellow writer, who died in 1878. Two years later, she married John Cross, an American banker who was 20 years her junior. It is said that they spent their wedding night in Venice, jumping from the hotel balcony into the canal.

Another notable buried at Highgate was Michael Faradaya British engineer who contributed to the modern understanding of electromagnetism and invented the Bunsen burner, an instrument used in laboratories to heat samples and chemicals.

The diversity of talents that attract visitors doesn’t stop there. The inventor and pioneer of British cinema William Friese-Greene He was the first person to see moving images on a screen, developing a series of photographs he took with a tripod in High Park in 1889. He was buried in Highgate after his death in 1921.

It’s impossible to ignore the singer, songwriter and producer George Michael, (1963-2016), whose real name was Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. He rose to fame as part of the duo Wham! in the 1980s before embarking on a successful solo career that drove fans crazy with timeless pieces like “Careless Whisper” and “Faith.”

But there is no doubt that the most visited tomb (and also the most vandalized) is that of Karl Marxconsidered one of the most influential figures in human history.

His radical ideas about society, economics and politics formed the theoretical basis of Marxism, which defends shared ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes.

Marx was buried in London because he lived in exile there after being expelled from Germany for his political ideas. Dying in 1883, he was buried in a simple grave in a secluded area of ​​Highgate that lay forgotten under vegetation for decades. In 1954, Marx’s remains were buried alongside his family in a more visible location in Highgate.

It is a shame that the dead do not speak, because it would be interesting to ask the intellectual what he thinks about the rise in prices of the plots adjacent to him.

Fuentes: The Guardian, NOW, TimeOut, LNHS, Historic UK, Daily Mail

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