Geograph - photograph every grid square

The steep Swains Lane must be one of the creepiest roads in London as it passes both Highgate West Cemetery and Highgate East Cemetery. This is from near the top of the road with Waterlow Park on the left and Highgate West Cemetery on the right. Highgate East Cemetery is further down the hill on the left beyond Waterlow Park.

Ian Nairn in 1966 in Nairn's London had this to say about Highgate West Cemetery: "There are better reasons for going here than to look at the grave of Karl Marx. This is the creepiest place in London; no Dickensian stretch of the river can match this calculated exercise in stucco horror, now itself decomposing. The entrance is well downhill in Swains Lane, and at first the landscape is ordinary. But as you wind up the hill it becomes more and more overgrown, choked in winter by dead fronds with an unnerving resemblance to Spanish moss. The landscape looks less and less like London, more and more like Lousiana.... Nothing seems real but death at its greyest and clammiest. The cemetery closes well before dark, and a good job too." At the top of Swains Lane is the closed north entrance - see Link