The Daily Telegraph (extract below, 16th January)has reported that Highgate Cemetery is looking to make profit by selling space for new graves near to where Karl Marx is now buried. Their ability to do this was cleared by legislation in 2022 and its worth keeping in mind that cemetery was originally designated specifically as a profitable enterprise.
Even so Marx would surely have appreciated the irony and marxists may be concerned if the wrong type of leftist ends up being buried near him…
Some older grave-sites, where the monuments are crumbling and contemporary relatives of the deceased are also long dead, have been earmarked for new burials, and the prime real estate near the occasionally defaced tomb of Marx will be first to be developed.
Mr Dungavell has set up an objection system, allowing surviving relatives of the 173,000 people buried in Highgate to stop individual graves being redeveloped.
The exiled Marx died in London in 1883 and was buried in a modest grave, before his body was reinterred in 1954 under a vast tomb paid for by the Communist Party of Great Britain, close to which were later buried Saad Saadi Adi, the Iraqi communist leader, Dr Yusuf Mohamed Dadoo, the chairman of the South African Communist Party, and Paul Foot, the Socialist Worker journalist.
Update 17th January
The Times has run an Editorial on the issue (17th January) which of course celebrates the idea of making money out of proximity to Marx’s grave. As often with Editorials in the Murdoch era it is short of important detail and wrong on others. For example pre-Covid the Cemetery attracted around 100,000 visitors a year, not a day as the Times thinks.
Highgate Cemetery was opened in 1839 by the London Cemetery Company specifically as a profit making venture. By the 1970s the Company was in financial trouble and no longer maintainig the Cemetery properly. A local group the Highgate Cemetery Trust stepped in to run it.
It is a charitable trust and receives no public funding, although it has received a £100,000 grant from the National Lottery Fund. The plans to exploit the area around Marx’s grave are hence not for profit but specifically not for profit
Leave a Reply