Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust has submitted plans for an £18 million transformation of the graveyard, where figures including Karl Marx and George Michael are buried, with new visitor facilities and refurbishment of listed buildings.
The first phase includes a new gardeners’ building with a staff and public toilet near a raised area called the Mound in the East Cemetery.
But Esther Oxford says the two-storey “brutalist-style cement block” should not be built 20 feet from plots sold to mourning families as a private woodland burial spot.
The Highgate resident claims the first she knew of the plans was in late March – three months after the public consultation had ended – and asked why posters had been put up in the West Cemetery but not the East Cemetery.
She questioned why she and her father were not warned of the proposals – in the Highgate Cemetery 2019 Conservation Plan – when they bought the plot in 2021.
In a letter to Camden Council’s planning department, she described her “alarm” when she learned of the plans, adding: “If my father and I had known that such an oppressive, ugly building were to turn the resting place of my mother into the backyard of a toilet block, I would never have chosen that grave site for my mother’s coffin.”
Describing grave owners on the Mound as a community of newly bereaved parents, sons, daughters, husbands and wives, she wrote: “There is the young couple whose nine-month-old baby is buried right next to the path leading up to the proposed entrance to the public toilet.
“They visit every week to lay fresh flowers at their baby’s grave. There are at two teenagers who regularly visit their lost parents’ graves to sob their hearts out.”
Instead, she suggested moving the gardeners’ building to the proposed West Side Building, and constructing a longer one-storey public toilet, office and storage block by the Mound, where it could act as a retaining wall and have less impact aesthetically.
Writing on the council planning portal, objector Emily Wood also said the building should be smaller or not built at all. She added: “The planning application has been developed purely on commercial grounds to attract visitors to what should be a place of solitude and rest.”
Elspeth Clements, co-chair of the Highgate Society Planning Group, supported the project, writing that the the cemetery and their agents had worked “closely” with the community, and that the “excellent” scheme resolved the needs for operational improvements while preserving the buildings and their setting.
The FHCT last year warned that ash dieback could kill “four out of five” trees in the cemetery, with new landscaping proposals addressing both the disease and drainage.
When plans were submitted, it said existing facilities “suffer from a cemetery that has been built by men”, and that more toilets for women would be created.
FHCT chief executive Ian Dungavell said he would be happy to speak to mourners individually.
He added: “We understand that grave owners may be worried that the activity around the building will detract from the peace and quiet appropriate to the cemetery.”
Mr Dungavell said the “quality” gardeners’ building would be designed by architects Michael Hopkins & Partners, also responsible for Glyndebourne Opera House.
He added: “We believe that this is the most appropriate location for the new building, which is sorely needed.
“It is crucial to support the maintenance of the cemetery for all users. The site is extremely constrained by burials and the previous owners sold off whatever land they could back in the 1960s, including an area just south of the Mound which had been used by the gardening team.”
Camden Council is expected to make a decision on the plans this year.
