LI life: Highgate competition By Ian Dungavell 1. and 2. The two images show exactly the same view taken approximately a century apart. © Highgate Cemetery Archive
Highgate Cemetery competition
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Over the past year, the Landscape Institute has been running a landscape masterplan competition for one of London’s most-loved cemeteries. Its Director outlines the challenges.
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his year has already been tough for trees. The end of March was unusually warm, and April was very dry and cold, leaving them desperate for water. But then May was perhaps the wettest ever, with torrential downpours and hail rather than the sedate day-long drizzle England has been famous for. Once they had started to come into leaf, an unusually deep area of low pressure brought winds of the strength we’d expect only in winter. If the weather was not stressful enough in itself, Highgate Cemetery’s trees also have to cope with cramped root space, sometimes straddling ledger stones or squeezing themselves in between brick vaults, all the time fighting for light with the other self-set upstarts of their generation. No wonder they get stressed and are more prone to pests and diseases. 58
A pragmatic policy over many years of landscape management by minimal intervention created an attractive aesthetic of ‘romantic decay’ which captivated visitors. Like others, the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, the charity which now runs the cemetery, was spellbound by its beauty and fearful of changes which might destroy it. Yet the landscape was gradually destroying itself and, unintentionally, biodiversity was declining. So too was the quality of its landscape design. Highgate Cemetery’s original ‘garden architect’ or ‘landscape engineer’, as he called himself, would have been horrified. David Ramsay was well-versed in the tradition of the Picturesque, and understood that sensations of contrast, variety and delight heightened the experience of moving through the landscape. This was no simple utilitarian landscape.
But open areas had become clogged with self-set trees and bramble, obscuring long and near views, and homogeneity ruled where surprise was called for. The Trust’s Conservation Plan, completed in 2019, set out the new balance which was to be achieved: ‘Trees of the most suitable species in the most suitable places and in good health will make it easier, and safer to appreciate the quality of our historic landscape. Furthermore, not only will they be less likely to damage memorials, this will be better for biodiversity too.’ That meant not only extending the lifespan of historic trees by careful management, but also reinstating structural planting, clearing areas of secondary woodland and replanting with a greater variety of trees and shrubs, reopening historic views and, crucially, thinking about biodiversity and the climate emergency. All the
