The Great Northern Hotel

Outshone a bit by its show-offy neighbour, the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel across the road, I actually like the rather more simple Great Northern Hotel. Now partly swallowed up as a result of developments to King’s Cross station next door, the building has a distinguished history as one of the country’s earliest purpose-built railway hotels and has Grade II listed status.

Standing at the entrance to King’s Cross station, the Great Northern Hotel is a fine example of clean-cut, classical elegance as contrasted with the gothic grandeur (or monstrosity, depending on your viewpoint!) of its neighbours - George Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras Station and Renaissance Hotel.

Early photo showing gated precinct & gardens

Built of yellow brick and with stucco dressings, the hotel was designed by Lewis Cubitt (younger brother of Thomas who designed so many of London’s most iconic buildings) and opened in 1854 to serve the new King’s Cross Station, completed by the architect just two years before. Originally the hotel looked across a gated precinct with ornamental gardens – popular with wealthy hotel patrons who wanted to be screened off from screen the less salubrious terraced streets to the north of the hotel, but over the years this area was annexed by station buildings and became “Station Place”.

One of the earliest purpose-built railway hotels in the country, the Great Northern was not only considered a glamorous place to stay, it was also ahead of its time in terms of structure and facilities. It boasted a state of the art fire-resistant construction, with thick masonry walls dividing every room, corridors constructed of brick arches, and stair landings and treads of stone rather than

The hotel in 2017

timber.  It had 160 rooms, including about 100 bedrooms and attached sitting rooms (the hotel was one of the first to include rooms on this “continental system”), and a hydraulic lift was added in the 1880s. The public rooms on the ground floor included a smoking room, a reading room, as well as lounges and a coffee room (later known as the dining-room). This latter room was the largest in the hotel, occupying four bays and the full width of the southern end of the building - a space of some 9 m by 14 m. It reportedly “rivalled

Map of King's Cross 1862
 

that of the Great Western Royal Hotel as the finest in London”. An underground ice-house to the north of the hotel, known from plans of the hotel, was linked by a short alley into the hotel cellars. With refrigeration yet to be developed, ice would be brought in bulk during the winter from Scandinavia, Canada, or elsewhere, and stored for use in the kitchens over the next months in underground structures known as ice-houses.
One of the most interesting features of the hotel is its shape. Interestingly, the Italianate-style curved frontage is not just an aesthetic flourish by the architect. It was designed to snugly follow the curve of Pancras Road, as this map from 1862 shows (the hotel is marked just south of the green area), and this ancient highway in turn followed along the banks of the River Fleet… hence the curve.

The hotel's Plum & Spilt Milk restaurant

The Great Northern Hotel in its original form had been in continuous operation for nearly 150 years before it closed in 2001. After lying derelict for a few years, it was resurrected in 2009 and has now undergone a £40 million pound makeover. Many of Cubitt’s original architectural features have been retained, creating what the architects call “a classic yet contemporary look”.  And though it may lack the visual drama of Gilbert Scott's Gothic monster, it is more ‘authentic’. Whereas most of the Renaissance's rooms are in a modern block to one side of the historic building, all the Great Northern’s rooms are part of the original structure.

And now, aptly enough given the reason for its creation in the first place, the hotel is permanently attached to King’s Cross station, the planners having taken the decision to incorporate it into the sweeping glass and white steel canopy that now forms the new entrance to the station. Entrance to the hotel itself is either from the station or from the street side, its front door facing St Pancras.

 References:

London’s Hidden Rivers David Fathers (2017)
https://www.kingscross.co.uk/media/48-HBS-Part-1.pdf

 

St Pancras Old Church

Many people will be familiar with St Pancras (New) Church which you drive past when heading west on Euston Road. Though very grand with its vast caryatids, it has become blackened by pollution over the years and so presents rather a sad sight. More interesting is the much older St Pancras Old Church, tucked away behind the station...

During Victorian excavation work on St Pancras Church, a Saxon altar-stone dating from 600 AD was discovered, suggesting that this is one of Europe’s (and certainly London’s) oldest Christian sites. The parish of Saint Pancras itself dates from the 9^th century. For hundreds of years, this was just a small village church out in the country. In 1593, the publisher John Norden wrote of it:

“Pancras Church… standeth all alone as utterly forsaken, old and weather-beaten. […] it is visited by thieves. Walk there not too late.”

The present church’s structure is mainly 14^th century, but its appearance today is more Victorian

St Pancras Church c. 1815

than medieval. The church stood right by the river Fleet till the latter was culverted in the 19^th century.

In the 17^th century, the parish of St Pancras was not highly regarded - ‘Thou Pancridge Parson’ was used as an insult - as the church had acquired a reputation for laxity with regard to marrying people without calling the banns. The churchyard was also a notorious spot for duelling. During the Civil War the church was used as a barracks and stable for Cromwell’s troops.

 

With an ever-growing congregation, the church was enlarged in 1726, and then again in 1792. Soon, however, it was realised that it could no longer cope with London’s burgeoning population and it became necessary to build a new parish church in Euston Road. This ‘New’ St Pancras Church was consecrated in 1822 but the old churchyard continued to be used as no burials were permitted at the new church except in its vaults. Burials continued until 1855, but before long it was full to capacity – mainly due to a serious cholera outbreak in 1849.

In 1863, the Midland Railway Company, who wanted the church’s land for a goods yard, put in a bid to purchase Old St Pancras Church for £20,000. This was rejected and the company had to be content with permission to build a viaduct across the churchyard. Many graves had to be dug up, causing great controversy. The architect’s apprentice given the task of moving the exhumed bodies was none other than Thomas Hardy, his work having to be done at night, behind screens. The dislodged gravestones are to this day still arranged around the 150 year-old ash known as “Hardy’s Tree”.

 

 

Charles Dickens is known to have often visited the churchyard. In his Tale of Two Cities, the corpse of a spy is brought to “the old church of St Pancras, far off in the fields”, only to be later removed by body-snatchers.

French revolutionaries' memorial

The churchyard has some interesting graves, including those of the composer J.S. Bach and Mary Wollstonecraft (1797). There is also a splendid memorial to the many aristocratic refugees from the French Revolution who are buried here and, famously, a striking funeral monument designed by Sir John Soane for his wife and himself. But there is also more than a smattering of murderers, blackmailers, pimps and thieves buried here! One epitaph, now completely eroded but recorded for posterity in F.T. Cansick’s Epitaphs of Middlesex (1869) reads: “The mortal remains of John Brindle: after an evil life of 64 years, died June 8^th 1822 and lies at rest beneath this stone.”

The churchyard became public gardens in 1877 and were laid out in their present form in 1891.

 

 

  On the churchyard’s south-eastern boundary stands the St Pancras Coroner’s Court by Frederick Eggar, a modest, ecclesiastical-style building dating from the late 1880s.

 

St Pancras Coroner's Court

Also overlooking the churchyard is St Pancras Hospital, formerly the Hospital for Tropical Diseases and once the St. Pancras Workhouse, established in the 1770s but progressively rebuilt over the following century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References:

The London Encyclopedia Ben Weinreb (2008)

111 Places in London You Shouldn’t Miss John Sykes (2016)

Wates’s Book of London Churchyards Harvey Hackman (1981)

London's Churches Christopher Hibbert (1980)