Justice

Now More Than Ever, London Needs a 'Death Pyramid'

Why the city should revive a 19th-century plan for an uptown necropolis, population 5 million.

"We have carved out a place for ourselves among the dead; the glittering pinnacles of commerce rise along the skyline, their foundations sunk in a charnel house; and the lost lie forgotten below us as, overhead, we persuade ourselves that we are immortal and carry on the business of life."

That's the cheery introduction to Necropolis: London and Its Dead, one of the all-time great reads about life's eternal bummer. There are great garden cemeteries in the West, Catharine Arnold writes—Green-Wood in New York, Père Lachaise in Paris—but perhaps none as fine as Highgate Cemetery in London. Designed by Stephen Geary and opened in 1839, Highgate framed the Victorian attitude toward death. Highgate inspired Arnold's book. And Highgate was home to a cool vampire.