Gothic London

Earlier this week I dipped a toe into the forgotten world of Abney Park cemetery. Think Highgate is gothic and overgrown? Forget it, it's a bowling green, centre court at Wimbledon, compared to this wilderness. This is post apocalyptic London. Survivors London, when the city has been cleared of almost every inhabitant and nature has stealthily crept back through the outer suburbs and then rampaged, bloomed and dominated the ravaged inner core.

It is the Amazon with headstones and memorial tablets; an enormous, dense canopy of thirty, forty feet trees; thick, long established bushes obscure  even the tallest tombstones, the smaller ones are buried under a thick matt of vegetation or have sunk back at crazy angles in to the earth.

Nowhere is in the same breath as melancholy or as menacing and laden with brooding gothic unease as this cemetery. It is as if it was designed for modern day vampires.