Highgate Village – "a place apart"

What kind of sorcery is this? We’re just a few stops up the Northern Line, but we’re in a country village nestling round what was once an old pond.

Yes, we’ve taken a brief tube journey into timeless England. Here are lanes and cottages and Georgian houses and spectacular views across London. Here are Coleridge, Dickens, Betjeman, Cromwell, Nell Gwyn, Dick Whittington, Jamie Oliver, Yehudi Menuhin, Jude Law, Kate Moss, George Michael and Sting. Here’s Witanhurst, the second largest house in London, complete with family connections to Mary, the London Walks “boss.”

And after the walk, you can tour Highgate Cemetery (“one of the most astonishing places in London… architecture’s answer to Hieronymus Bosch”). Or stroll over to Kenwood House, the Platonic ideal of an aristocratic country house: perfection indoors (its world-class art collection) and outdoors (its landscaped gardens, the way it crowns its wooded slope on the Heath). Welcome to the perfect Sunday morning London Walk. But keep it under your hat, because if the word gets out Highgate’s going to be a major tourist attraction!