Famous Figures Buried in London: A Guide to Historic Cemeteries and Churches

London's burial grounds read like a "Who's Who" of British and world history. Key sites and their notable interments:

Westminster Abbey (The Nation's Valhalla)

Monarchs: Elizabeth I, Mary I, Henry III, Edward the Confessor.
Scientists: Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking (ashes).
Writers: Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Others: Laurence Olivier, David Livingstone, William Wilberforce.

St Paul's Cathedral

Architect: Sir Christopher Wren ("Reader, if you seek his monument, look around").
Artists: J.M.W. Turner, John Constable.
Scientists: Alexander Fleming (penicillin), Sir Alexander Graham Bell.
Heroes: Duke of Wellington, Lord Nelson (crypt).

Highgate Cemetery (Victorian Gothic Masterpiece)

Karl Marx (East Cemetery).
Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide).
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans).
Michael Faraday, Christina Rossetti, Lucian Freud.

Kensal Green Cemetery (First Garden Cemetery, 1833)

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (engineer).
William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope (novelists).
Lord Byron's wife (Annabella), Princess Sophia (George III's daughter).

Brompton Cemetery (Royal Park, 1840)

Emmeline Pankhurst (suffragette).
John Snow (cholera epidemiology).
Beatrix Potter (ashes), Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (composer).

Nunhead Cemetery (Gothic Revival, SE London)

Joseph Bazalgette (London sewers).
John Rennie (engineer).
John Everett Millais (Pre-Raphaelite).

Tower of London (Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula)

Executed royalty/prisoners: Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Guy Fawkes.

Many cemeteries offer guided tours. Highgate (East) requires booking. All are reachable by Tube/Overground.