On a recent guided walk around King’s Cross, I found myself in an area known in the 19^th century as Agar Town, now long since vanished from the map of London. I was intrigued to know where it had gone, and why?

Named after the lawyer William Agar, to whom the site was let in 1840, Agar Town was the name of the district behind what is now St Pancras Station. An eminently respectable-sounding Victorian suburb – with streets called Canterbury Place, Durham Street and Oxford Crescent – it

1851 map

occupied a wedge of land sandwiched between the railway lines leading to King’s Cross and Euston stations.  If the inhabitants of Somers Town (which bordered Agar to the south and west) were considered “low” and “working-class”, those of Agar Town were seen as the personification of abject poverty. Little more than a shanty town, housing in Agar Town consisted most of small, ramshackle tenements and conditions were terrible. The local vestry failed to provide “Ague Town”, as it soon became known, with street lighting or cleaning. There was also no sewerage, and the place quickly became associated with filth and disease. Despite having a population of around 5,000 people by 1847, there was no school, church or chapel other than the Old Saint Pancras church which was in the process of being restored. Eventually a temporary iron church was therefore erected in Agar Town, along with a Ragged School in Old Pancras Road. Building of a permanent church began in 1859, but it was never completed.

Frederick Williams, in his "History of the Midland Railway” (1875), draws a particularly unprepossessing picture of Agar Town before the redevelopment of the area: "Old St. Pancras churchyard was invaded, and Agar Town almost demolished. Yet those who knew this district at that time have no regret at the change. Time was when the wealthy owner of a large estate had lived here in his mansion; but after his departure the place became a very 'abomination of 

Paradise Row in Agar Town

desolation.' In its centre was what was termed La Belle Isle, a dreary and unsavoury locality, abandoned to mountains of refuse from the metropolitan dust-bins, strewn with decaying vegetables and foul-smelling fragments of what once had been fish, or occupied by knackers'-yards and manure-making, bone-boiling, and soap-manufacturing works, and smoke-belching potteries and brick-kilns. At the broken doors of mutilated houses canaries still sang, and dogs lay basking in the sun, as if to remind one of the vast colonies of bird-fanciers and dog-fanciers who formerly made Agar Town their abode; and from these dwellings came out wretched creatures in rags and dirt, and searched amid the far-extending refuse for the filthy treasure by the aid of which they eked out a miserable livelihood; whilst over the whole neighbourhood the gas-works poured forth their mephitic vapours, and the canal gave forth its rheumatic dampness, extracting in return some of the more poisonous ingredients in the atmosphere, and spreading them upon the surface of the water in a thick scum of various and ominous hues. Such was Agar Town before the Midland Railway came into the midst of it."

Other writers and commentators queued up to pour scorn on the slums of Agar Town. Charles Dickens weighed into the discussion, calling the area ”our English Connemara”, a reference to the poverty found all over rural Ireland at this time. Yet despite its reputation as a place where only the “lowest of the low” lived, recent research suggests this has been much exaggerated. For example, census records of 1861 shows that there were skilled artisans among Agar Town’s residents, including more than a few cabinet-makers, wood turners and piano makers.

Demolition of Agar Town
 

 Whatever the true demographic of this notorious district, there was no escaping the far-reaching changes that lay just around the corner. In 1866 the Midland Railway Company approached the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, then landlords of Agar Town, with an offer of almost 20,000 pounds to take the place off their hands with a view to large-scale demolition. The “clearance”, including the half-finished church, was completed within just two months. In all, 4,000 homes were destroyed to make way for goods yards and gas holders, and a population of around 32,000 people was displaced. The neighbourhood soon became a scene of chaos, with massive mounds of débris from both the demolished houses and the tunnels being dug for the railway. The (mainly) weekly tenants were evicted without compensation.  

And so a whole district was effectively wiped from London’s map. By the time Charles Booth drew up his poverty map in 1889, there was no sign of Agar Town.  Its name is, however, today commemorated by Agar Grove (originally called St Paul's Road, Camden Town), a road that runs along the edge of where Agar Town used to be. Cambridge Street, once the centre of Agar Town, has a new identity as Camley Street, now home to a popular nature reserve.

 

References:

1.   http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol5/pp368-373

2.       Working paper: Mapping Poverty in Agar Town - economic conditions prior to the development of St Pancras Station in 1866 by Steven P. Swensen (2006):  http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22539/1/0906Swensen.pdf

3.       Article: From Cripplegate to Agar Town: inside London's vanished neighbourhoods (2015): http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jun/24/london-vanished-neighbourhoods-cripplegate-agar-town-limehouse-chinatown