Want to take a city's pulse? Head for the graveyard

Anyone who has read of Pip's terrifying encounter with Magwitch in Great Expectations will be aware of the elemental power of graveyards. And anyone who has heard Hamlet contemplate Yorick's skull ('Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft') will have been reminded that these are the ultimate cold showers in which to confront questions of mortality.

Forget landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building or the Colosseum; cemeteries are the punctuation marks in between, quiet islands amid the city racket. A great one is an architectural jewel in its own right, a Vanity Fair party of spot-the-dead-celebrity, a stark warning from history, a store of cracking anecdotes or a life-affirming communion with past generations.

My favourite, as it happens, is close to home, an oasis of green calm in north London. I first went to Highgate Cemetery to see the graves of Karl Marx, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Michael Faraday, Ralph Richardson, Radclyffe Hall and former Observer owner Julius Beer among the 168,000 buried there. Not forgetting Elizabeth Siddal, muse of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who was buried with Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems to her nestling between her cheek and hair; unfortunately, it being Rossetti's only copy, he had to dig up the coffin when he decided to publish the poems some years later.

What impressed me more, however, was the sense of stepping into a wonderful Victorian garden from a children's fairy-tale. The cemetery spills over with trees, shrubbery and wild flowers, and is made unique by ambitious 19th-century architecture such as an 'Egyptian Avenue', along which vaults are carved into the hillside, and a 'Circle of Lebanon' dominated by a towering cedar tree.

With birds singing and nature abundant, this place, maintained by heroic volunteers, is also about the circle of life. As a plant climbs up and obscures a moss-coated gravestone, it's an optimistic symbol of how death is respected here but not allowed to get in the way of the living.

There's a different, more formal feel to Paris's Père-Lachaise - possibly the most visited cemetery in the world - which makes it all the more ecstatically surprising to find the grey stone of Oscar Wilde's Art Deco tomb coated in pink lipstick kisses.