Visitors have flocked to London’s most famous resting place since 1839 (now over 100,000 annual visitors), to gaze upon the graves of the great and the good, and to admire the views over London, one of its original marketing strategies. A site this popular needs a visitor’s centre, and the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, which maintains the cemetery without public funding, is launching a competition to design one, plus shop and café.

Opened in 1840, Abney was originally laid out as an arboretum, with 2,500 plant varieties. Trees were planted alphabetically around the perimeter, with oaks, pines and others within. As an inclusive cemetery, it catered for burials of people from all faiths. Many abolitionists, opposed to slavery, and the first black activist, Olaudah Equiano, are buried here, as are Salvation Army founders William and Catherine Booth, many Victorian music-hall stars, and wildlife enthusiasts.

Inspired by Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Kensal Green, lying between Harrow Road and the Grand Union Canal, was London’s first commercial cemetery, opening in 1833. The buildings are neo-classical and neatly laid out on long avenues lined by impressive Gothic mausoleums. Famous names with their final resting places here include engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Freddie Mercury.

For commemoration of deaths of a different kind visit Postman’s Park, where no one’s actually buried. Instead, 62 individuals, who lost their lives trying to save someone else’s, are remembered. The 54 memorial plaques tell their moving tales in beautiful script, with the heroes’ ages, where they lived, their jobs, along with the circumstances of their heroic act and death: burning, drowning, run down by horses and hit by trains. The first plaques were installed in 1900 and the last in 2009.

Its layout evokes an open-air cathedral, with a central domed chapel reached via colonnades based on those in St Peter’s Square in Rome. Among the 60-plus species of tree, planted to shade the graves, the limes date from 1838. It’s Grade I listed, with graves, including Dr John Snow, who proved that cholera is spread through infected drinking water, suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and actor Brian Glover. Combine sightseeing with sustenance at Café North Lodge.

Its name is a corruption of ‘bonehill’, as the site had been used for burials since Saxon times, but also became a dumping ground for bones from St Paul’s charnel house in 1549. It opened in 1665 and closed for burials in 1852. ‘Big names’ buried here include poet and visionary William Blake and Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe, but among the most eye-catching memorials is that of Dame Mary Page.A small site, surrounded by tall buildings, it’s popular for local workers’ lunch-breaks.