Père Lachaise, the first garden cemetery, which opened outside Paris in 1804, was created in response to changing attitudes to death and overcrowding of Parisian burial grounds. This new form of sacred landscape became successful and was imitated in Europe and North America. Highgate Cemetery in North London opened in 1839 and was compared at the time to Père Lachaise, alongside other British cemeteries. This paper examines the landscape development of these two cemeteries up to 1914 and assesses how directly the Père Lachaise ‘model’ was applied at Highgate. Cemeteries help us understand the changing ways death was understood and ritualised through funerals, being spaces where these attitudes and meanings were actively negotiated. Both cemeteries were designed to accommodate visitors spending leisure time there, which also effected their form and function and allowed cemeteries and monuments to influence social practices more widely. Garden cemeteries offered new opportunities for monumentalising the dead, making gravestones open to a wider section of the public. This led to innovations in style, form and decoration. The elite explored ways of designing monuments which would maintain a differentiation between their graves and others in the cemetery. Although gravestones are erected as a focus for private grief and to aid with locating dead loved ones, monuments also present a curated identity of the deceased to the world. For those with a public profile, their monuments must also function as ‘sites of memory’. This paper examines ways these monuments achieve this and their wider effect on cemetery development.