Cemeteries and memorials to visit London

Located south of Kensington Gardens, opposite the Royal Albert Hall, this neo-Gothic memorial was commissioned by Queen Victoria to commemorate her husband and great love Prince Albert of Saxony Coburg Gotha. It measures almost 50 meters and was completed in 1872. A gilded statue depicts Albert holding a catalog from the 1851 Universal Exhibition. The Kensington district, also known as Albertopolis, owes a great deal to Prince Albert, who thought up and supported the creation of the world's greatest museums, including the famous Victoria & Albert Museum.

This beautiful Victorian cemetery is a must-see when you're in the small village of Highgate. Among the anonymous are some 850 notables and celebrities, including Karl Marx and George Eliot. But it's the Gothic appearance of the tombs - angels, funerary urns, Celtic crosses, all surrounded by lush vegetation - that really stands out. Following bizarre incidents in the 1970s, vampire hunts shook public opinion. The latest famous arrival is George Michael, but his grave in a private plot is not accessible.

An Anglo-Jamaican, Mary Seacole (1805-1881) was a nurse by vocation. Although she is best known for having traveled the Caribbean, treating the most destitute populations, she is most famous and respected for her commitment to the Crimean War. After being refused a place on a team of white nurses organized by Florence Nightingale, she decided to join the Crimean front on her own initiative during the war of 1854. It was a decision that precipitated her impoverishment, forcing her to stay in the Crimea longer than she had planned. Although she was a contemporary of nurse Florence Nightingale, and just as famous as the latter in her day, Mary Seacole has been forgotten by history. Her story, which nonetheless commands respect, is a crying illustration of the importance of the intersectionality of struggles. In London, it wasn't until 2016 and the erection of this statue in the gardens of St. Thomas's Hospital that a black woman was represented in public space. In front of Westminster Palace, Mary Seacole is shown walking into the wind, right fist clenched, medicine bag on her back, in a posture combining power and humility. The statue is 4.9 m high and made of bronze. On her back is a large bronze disk, symbolizing the land on which Mary Seacole had set up her treatment center in the Crimea.

It sounds silly to say that a cemetery is quiet, but that's the main interest of the place, this soothing and restful aspect. With its old Victorian graves, covered with moss and all slightly bent, the place does not lack charm. They only come alive with the presence of numerous squirrels who also enjoy the calm of the surroundings. If some English personalities are buried here, it is however the tombs of anonymous people which present the most interest. A beautiful place for a contemplative and serene moment.