The Lost Girls of Highgate Cemetery

Rosie Fiore-Burt on upcoming play from Theatre in the Square

Back by popular demand!

A moving and thought-provoking play devised and performed by local community group Theatre in the Square at Highgate Cemetery.

Ten ‘fallen women’, the youngest only fourteen years old, lay nameless and forgotten in an unmarked grave in Highgate Cemetery’s West side for over a century, until volunteers at the cemetery began to look into the story and find out a surprising amount about the girls and their backgrounds.

Drawing on research, contemporaneous accounts and imagination, Theatre in the Square tells the stories of these ‘Lost Girls’. What was daily life like in ‘The House of Mercy’, Highgate’s strict penitentiary for fallen women?

Christina Rossetti served as a volunteer at the house: could these girls’ stories have been the inspiration for some of her poetry?

Were they prostitutes, sinners and hopeless cases, or were they ordinary girls, with teenage hopes and dreams, before hardship befell them? What led them to an relatively ignominious end in an unmarked plot in the cemetery?

This play, first performed in the cemetery chapel last year, reveals compelling lives, tragically cut short by poverty and illness. The girls may be lost to time, but they will now be honoured and not forgotten.

Outdoors in the courtyard. Seating provided, but wear suitable clothing.

Tickets and further details here.

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