The Highgate Society has unveiled a new plaque to the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell on Highgate Hill, adding a second marker beside the original 130-year-old London County Council plaque. The new plaque, revealed on October 8, features a colour image of Marvell's cottage, taken from an 1869 photograph, alongside two passages from his poems. The initiative aims to make passers-by stop and reflect on the poet and the lost world he inhabited.
Remembering a poet and his vanished cottage
Marvell, a poet, wit, and member of Parliament, spent much of his adult life in a cottage on Highgate Hill. The cottage was demolished in the late 19th century, and its site beside Lauderdale House is now part of Waterlow Park. A photograph taken in 1869 shows a flight of steps rising from Highgate Hill to his door, and the bottom step can still be seen at the foot of the park wall. For 130 years, a modest London County Council plaque has marked the spot, but many passers-by never noticed it.
The Highgate Society set out to add a second plaque alongside the first, one that would make people stop. Three members took on the task: Michael Hammerson, who researched the history; Valerie Doulton, founder of the Live Literature Company; and Francis Wilkinson, secretary of the Highgate Society.
Plaque design and poetic inscriptions
The plaque carries a colour image of the cottage from the 1869 photograph, alongside two passages from Marvell's verse. The first comes from "To His Coy Mistress," the poem that opens "Had we but world enough and time:" and includes the lines "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near." Wilkinson noted that although Marvell was writing about love and urgency, beside the wall where his house once stood, the lines read just as well as a reflection on how quickly places, and the people in them, pass.
The second passage draws on Marvell's frequent return to gardens in his verse: "I have a garden of my own, / But so with roses overgrown, / And lilies, that you would it guess / To be a little wilderness." Waterlow Park was given, in its creator Sir Sydney Waterlow's words, as "a garden for the gardenless," making what Wilkinson called a happy match between the poet and the ground that now remembers him.
Unveiling ceremony with local and academic figures
On a sunny October 8 afternoon, the mayor of Camden, Cllr Trisha Leman, unveiled the plaque. Dr Matthew Augustine of the Andrew Marvell Society travelled from St Andrews to speak, and as he read Marvell aloud, the poet's voice seemed briefly at home again on Highgate Hill. The event was attended by Dr Augustine, Wilkinson, Cllr Leman, Doulton, and Hammerson.
The Highgate Society hopes the plaque will invite residents and visitors to pause, look at the little cottage, read the verses, and feel for a moment the long reach of time. Wilkinson serves as secretary of the Highgate Society, and the group continues to engage with local heritage through such projects.
