Dozens of grave owners confronted Highgate cemetery’s bosses and their architects this week in a growing row over a maintenance and toilet block in a part of the graveyard where almost 200 people were recently buried.
The cemetery called Tuesday’s private meeting in an attempt to placate objectors by setting out adjustments to a new building that is part of an £18m redevelopment of the graveyard.
But the meeting descended into heckles, chants, a walkout, legal threats, demands for compensation and accusations that cemetery was putting the needs of tourists above mourners.
A recording of the meeting, heard by the Guardian, revealed unanimous and often furious opposition to what grave owners have called “the bunker”. The controversial block is due to be located on the mound, an area of the cemetery of about 170 recent graves including those of the sociologist Prof Stuart Hall, the artist Gustav Metzger, and the critic Tom Lubbock.
Among those objecting were the actor Bertie Carvel, whose mother, Pat, was buried on the mound in 2019. He told the meeting it was “crazy” to locate the “brutalist” building in part of the cemetery “most frequented by active mourners”.
Pleading with the cemetery’s managers, he said: “I’m sure it is not deliberately insensitive but given the strength of feeling please, please, please will you stop. Go away and rethink.”
His fellow actor Pam Miles demanded that the cemetery pay for the cost of exhuming the remains of her actor husband, Tim Pigott-Smith, if the scheme goes ahead. “It leaves us no option but to exhume. In the circumstances it would be fair to expect you to repay us for these expensive graves.”
Staff from Hopkins Architects, who designed the scheme, were repeatedly heckled and shouted down as they argued the building could not be placed in any other part of the 14.5-hectare (36-acre) graveyard.
A lawyer, who afterwards asked not to be named, said he and others were planning to sue the cemetery for breach of contract. The man, who owns a double plot where his partner his buried, told the meeting: “What we bought was a site with open views and you are changing that. You need to think about whether there are potential legal ramifications from people like me if you carry on with this.”
Separately, a letter to the cemetery’s trustees signed by more than 30 grave owners, claimed the charity had breached consumer rights of those who had recently bought plots by failing to inform them of the plan to redevelop the cemetery.
It also threatened to report the trust to the Charity Commission over consultation failures and reputational damage to the cemetery. And it warned they were prepared to allege mismanagement to the National Heritage Lottery Fund, at a time when the cemetery is seeking £18m of funding for the redevelopment.
At the meeting architects defended the building. One denied it was brutalist, saying: “That’s just not correct. There’s more poetry to it than that.”
One of the objectors shouted: “Bollocks.”
Undeterred, the architects outlined proposed changes to the block including removing an accessible toilet and reducing the height and width of the building.
At this point Natalie Chambers, whose parents are both buried on the mound, left the meeting in protest. As she left she said: “I’m appalled. You don’t listen to us one bit. My father was in the Warsaw ghetto. And you are so disgusting I don’t even want to come to the cemetery any more.”
There followed a chant from the room of: “We don’t want the building.”
A screenwriter, Anna Seifert-Speck, whose husband was buried on the mound in 2019, said: “We are asking you to reconsider bulldozing over our complaints. Lowering the thing a little bit isn’t going to work, it’s not want we want.”
Another grave owner said: “It’s a graveyard for us. It’s not a tourist site.”
A barrister said the mound area was the “worst possible” location for the building. “There is a concentration of nothing but contemporary graves there. That’s why you have so many people in this room. My young daughter lies there.
“You must see that the notion of having toilets right next to the graves of loved ones causes pain and anguish. The solution is simple: don’t build on the mound.”
Speaking after the meeting, Carvel said: “Mourning in a cemetery ranks higher than visiting a place of historic interest. The force of those arguments must have rung loud to anyone with an ounce of humanity. But we are also dealing with a corporate decision-making process and I remain somewhere between anxious and cynical about the extent to which that organisation will look itself in the mirror and admit it was wrong.”
The architects and trustees agreed to reflect on the feedback and report back to the grave owners in the coming weeks.
Elizabeth Fuller, the chair of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, acknowledged failures in the way recent grave owners had been consulted about the plans and pledged “better communication in the future”.
At the start of the meeting she said: “As required by the planning process, and by [the] reality [of the site], we have had to balance the benefits and harms of all constituent elements. We will commit to amending our plans wherever possible.”
