England
London
Plague pits, Victorian surgery, and a cemetery with a waiting list.
London has been dying spectacularly for two thousand years and kept the receipts. Plague pits under the parks, seven grand Victorian cemeteries, and museums full of things in jars nobody mentions at dinner.
It sprawls, so pick a patch and go deep. Southwark and the East End hold most of the good gloom.
Go when November. Dark by four, wet cobbles, Highgate at its gloomiest.
Haunt
What to See
Ossuaries, oddity museums, cemeteries and the properly strange.
-
Highgate Cemetery
The most beautiful and most gothic cemetery in Britain, all ivy-drowned Egyptian avenues and toppling angels. Book the West tour. The overgrown East has Marx and a lot of quiet.
Best shot The Circle of Lebanon and the Egyptian Avenue; photography is allowed on the West tour with a ticket.
- Quiet
- Solo-friendly
-
The Old Operating Theatre Museum
A Victorian operating theatre and herb garret up a spiral stair in a church attic, from before anaesthetic. The oldest one left in Europe. Small and grim.
- Solo-friendly
-
The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities
A cabinet of curiosities that lost its mind: two-headed animals, occult junk, celebrity bodily whatnot, cocktail bar downstairs. Half museum, half fever dream.
- Adults only
-
Crossbones Graveyard
An unconsecrated medieval burial ground for the outcast dead, mostly sex workers and paupers, now a ribbon-tied shrine kept by volunteers. Small and quietly devastating. Free.
- Quiet
- Solo-friendly
-
Sir John Soane's Museum
An architect’s house stuffed to the ceiling with antiquities, including the sarcophagus of Seti I in the basement. Free, candlelit some evenings, gorgeously claustrophobic.
- Quiet
- Solo-friendly
-
St Dunstan in the East
A church blitzed in the war and left as a ruin, now a small public garden growing up through the gothic windows and arches. The most beautiful quiet corner in the City, and free.
Best shot Gothic window frames full of vines, greenest and softest in morning light.
- Quiet
-
Leadenhall Market
An ornate 1881 market hall of painted ironwork and glass that stood in as Diagon Alley on film. Dead quiet at weekends, gorgeous under its own lamps.
Best shot Empty on a weekend morning with the cobbles wet, the painted ironwork glowing.
-
Abney Park Cemetery
A Victorian cemetery gone completely feral, angels swallowed by ivy and a ruined gothic chapel at its heart. One of the Magnificent Seven, and the wildest of them.
Best shot Angels lost in brambles and the roofless chapel at the centre. Wear boots.
- Quiet
- Solo-friendly
Rest
Where to Stay
B&Bs, haunted old hotels, Victorian piles. No hostels, ever.
-
The Zetter Townhouse
$$$$A mad aunt’s house full of taxidermy and oddities with a serious cocktail lounge. The most on-brand bed in the city.
- Adults only
- Quiet
-
Batty Langley's
$$$$Georgian rooms, four-posters, roll-top baths, candlelight everywhere, hidden on an 18th-century street. Named after a gothic architect. Very theatrical.
- Adults only
- Quiet
-
Hazlitt's
$$$Four creaking 1718 townhouses of dark panelling and antique beds. No lift, plenty of alleged ghosts, a lot of charm.
- Quiet
- Adults only
Feast
Where to Eat & Drink
Candlelit cellars, dark bars, rooms with history in the walls.
-
Gordon's Wine Bar
$$The oldest wine bar in London, in a candlelit cellar so low and dark you are basically eating in a cave. Get there early or queue, and know it packs out after work.
- Party scene
-
The Blackfriar
$$A wedge-shaped 1905 pub carved all over with grinning bronze monks. Arts and crafts excess that tips into the occult. A pint here counts as sightseeing.
- Touristy
-
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese
$$Rebuilt in 1667, a warren of gloomy sawdust rooms and cellars where Dickens drank. Mind your head on the way down.
- Touristy
-
The Cauldron
$$A potion-making cocktail bar for when you want your gothic with a wand and dry ice. Silly, fun, no apologies, and often full of hen parties.
- Adults only
- Party scene
Nothing matches those filters. .