Highgate - Notable Inhabitants

Notable Inhabitants

Recent and current inhabitants of Highgate include:

• Tariq Ali
• Julian Barratt
• Stanley Baxter
• Andy Bell
• Arthur Boyd
• Sarah Blackwood
• Sir Jacob Bronowski
• Craig Charles
• Sir Clifford Curzon
• Ray Davies
• Noel Fielding
• Roger Fry
• Kate Garraway
• Stephen Gately
• Stella Gibbons
• Terry Gilliam
• Geri Halliwell
• Freddie Highmore
• Bob Hoskins
• Cindy Jackson
• Terry Jones
• Ulrika Jonsson
• Judge Jules
• Ralf Little
• Sienna Miller
• Marina Diamandis
• Yehudi Menuhin (and later Sting who bought Menuhin's old house)
• Ewan Mcgregor
• George Michael
• Piers Morgan
• Kate Moss
• Chris Moyles
• Paul Nicholas
• Christopher Nolan
• Clive Owen
• Cliff Parisi
• Tim Pigott-Smith
• J. B. Priestley
• Jonathan Pryce
• Dizzee Rascal
• Heath Robinson
• John James Sainsbury
• Peter Sellers
• Alison Steadman
• Rod Stewart
• Imre Varadi
• Victoria Wood
• Martin Rix
• Lord Young of Dartington
• Toby Young
• Alex Zane

Highgate Cemetery is the burial place of Karl Marx, Michael Faraday, Douglas Adams, George Eliot, Jacob Bronowski, Sir Ralph Richardson, Christina Rossetti, Sir Sidney Nolan, Alexander Litvinenko, Malcolm McLaren, and Radclyffe Hall.

• Adjacent to the Highgate cemetery is Holly Lodge Estate, one of only two housing-estates built in the UK for single women; formerly, it was the home and grounds of Baroness Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts.
• Between 1930 and 1939, the wife and son of Adolf Hitler's half-brother, Alois, lived in Highgate, before moving to the United States. Bridget and Patrick Hitler lived at 26 Priory Gardens.
• Sadie Frost has an office in the village.
• Leslie Compton, formerly an Arsenal F.C footballer and a Middlesex cricketer, owned a pub in Highgate after he retired from sports.
• Newcastle United F.C. striker Nile Ranger was born in Highgate.

The MP for the Hampstead and Highgate constituency since 1992 has been Labour's Glenda Jackson. It is now part of the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency, formed at the 2010 general election. Lynne Featherstone is the Liberal Democrat MP for the Hornsey and Wood Green constituency, which covers the northern half of Highgate village. The Boundary Commission report of 2003 recommended separating the Camden part of Highgate from the remainder of its present constituency and joining it with Kentish Town and Holborn to the south.

Many notable alumni have passed through Highgate School, either Masters or indeed Old Cholmeleians, the name given to old boys of the school. These include T. S. Eliot, who taught the poet laureate John Betjeman there, Gerard Manley Hopkins the poet, the composers John Taverner and John Rutter, John Venn the inventor of Venn diagrams, actor Geoffrey Palmer, Anthony Crosland MP and Labour reformer, and the cabinet minister Charles Clarke.

Peter Sellers lived as a boy in a cottage in Muswell Hill Road, where his mother had moved in order to send him to the Catholic St Aloysius boys' school in Hornsey Lane.

In Victorian times St Mary Magdalene house of charity in Highgate was a refuge for former prostitutes - "fallen women" - where Christina Rossetti was a volunteer from 1859 to 1870. It may have inspired her best-known poem, Goblin Market.

Siouxsie And The Banshees' bassist Steven Severin was born and brought up there.