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)