Highgate Cemetery
MICA's team were shortlisted to develop a concept design for the Highgate Cemetery for a new 25-year masterplan for the site, to secure its future and ensure it remains a historic, and sustainable, twenty-first century cemetery.The vision to preserve and further enhance the cultural significance of Highgate Cemetery involves a range of projects of different scales: effectively a masterplan approach broken into parts, and managed as two parallel works streams: buildings and landscape.
In our response to the architectural brief, we brought a holistic strategy as well as design detail to maximise impact with minimum disturbance, carefully tuned to site and context. We developed a number of options for the various sites across the cemetery in collaboration with Conservation Architects Acanthus Clews; Structural engineers engineers HRW; service engineers Clearwater; access consultant Jane Simpson; planning consultant Montagu Evans; and transport consultant Steer.
In developing a number of options we explored the principles below:
The right activity in the right place
Finding efficiency and flexibility in adjacent relationships
Flexibility to adapt to a range of uses
Protecting and enhancing the sense of sanctuary
Increasing presence while managing impact
