Civic group the Highgate Society hopes to launch the Highgate Village History and Mystery audio tour before the end of summer.
Society member Deborah Greenfield has joined forces with Voice Map, a self-guided audio tour app, to give visitors a comprehensive history tour, complete with soundscapes.
She has created a script to capture the spirit and the history of the area where a settlement has existed since the Middle Ages.
The tour starts outside Highgate Cemetery’s neo-gothic western entrance and takes the tourist through leafy parkland to Lauderdale House, up the historic high street, and into the heart of the village.
According to the script: “Stories, true or not, of ‘pretty, witty’ Nell Gwynn, philanthropists, writers, highwaymen and ghosts will keep you company along the way.”
Deborah added: “We make the most of our Highgate ghosts, with some good ones at the Flask and Gatehouse pubs.”
The most famous is Mother Marnes, a Jacobean widow murdered for her money.
Her spirit is said to tread the boards of what is now the Upstairs at the Gatehouse theatre. But in the 17th Century the rooms above the Gatehouse pub were used as a courthouse, giving rise to one theory about the origin of the haunting.
“They think the reason she might be a restless ghost is because the wrong person was convicted for it, that’s one of the ideas,” said Deborah.
Deborah said she spent around 50 hours developing the script including research, liaising with groups including Highgate Society’s tourism team, local historians and The Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution (HSLI).
She has also added sound effects, explaining: “When people walk up a stretch where there’s not a lot of particular things to point out, they will be accompanied with a soundscape of what Highgate High Street might have sounded like in the 1700s or 1800s with a fiddler playing in the background and church bells and people talking, town criers shouting and selling their wares and horses and chickens.”
She added: “Apart from one tour recently published for Hampstead, there’s no other VoiceMap tours for this area of London, so we’re hoping that ours we’ll really stand out.
“It has loads of historical information but we’ve also aimed to make it fun and immersive.”
The tour should take people about an hour, she says, but people can stop the app if they want to stop in a pub for a while.
With the most visited place in Highgate being the cemetery with 100,000 visitors a year, Deborah added: “We hope that people will include our tour before or after visiting Highgate Cemetery.”
