ST. PANCRAS, a railway station & two churches

St. Pancras Hotel

 Unfortunately, when I get to St. Pancras station, I'm usually in a hurry to catch a train, either from there, from King's Cross across the road, or Euston, a brisk 5 minute walk away.

The modern two-level railway station of St. Pancras International lays behind the impressive Gothic St. Pancras Hotel, now fully renovated.

Now, I'm no big fan of the over-blown gothic splendour of St. Pancras, but this shot of the station in juxtaposition with the brand-new Francis Crick Institute is a good demonstration of how London is still evolving.

Love the above view of the very modern British Library, overlooked by the gothic higgledy-piggledy of the St. Pancras Hotel. It pleases me that the designers of the new British Library building took care to ensure that it echoed the terracotta and dark grey of St. Pancras across the road, so neither building stands out like a sore thumb.

Francis Crick Institute

As you walk out of the 'back door' of St. Pancras International onto Midland Road, directly opposite, you can hardly miss the Francis Crick Institute. I watched it being built, and today was the first time I had seen the entire building.

The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical research centre in London, which was established in 2010 and opened in 2016. The institute is a partnership between Cancer Research UK, Imperial College London, King's College London, the Medical Research Council, University College London and the Wellcome Trust.

St. Pancras International Station

The station, as well as being a national London terminus, is also the terminus for both the Javelin Hi-Speed 1 services to Kent, and the Hi-Speed Eurostar services to the continent.

At the bottom of the stairs leading up to the Eurostar platforms stands a statue of Sir John Betjeman, who was a lifelong advocate of preserving Victorian architecture.

At the end of the Eurostar platform is another statue - The Meeting Place, by sculptor Paul Day. You can see why it is so named.......

Also on the upper concourse, is a statue of poet, John Betjeman, sculpted by Martin Jennings. He is depicted admiring the roof of St. Pancras. Betjeman was a lifelong advocate of Victorian architecture, especially in railways. 

John Betjeman was poet laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984. Betjeman campaigned again and again to save threatened Victorian landmarks, especially during that philistine decade that was the 1960s.  Palatial St Pancras station could have been lost had it not been for his efforts.

He also had a fondness for churches and churchyards - upon which he wrote a beautiful poem, called quite simply 'Churchyards'. It contains a few words that persuaded me to look at churches before all else, to find the true nature of an area:

Our churches are our history shown
In wood and glass and iron and stone.

ST. PANCRAS OLD CHURCH

Couldn't explore the interior today, as it is being refurbished. Definitely looks like a return visit will be required.

However, the exterior is beautiful and there's lot to see in the grounds. It is dedicated to St. Pancras, who is popularly venerated as the patron saint of children, jobs and health. His name is also invoked against cramps, false witnesses, headaches and perjury. 

Pancras was a Roman citizen who converted to Christianity and was beheaded for his faith at the age of fourteen, around the year 304. His name is Greek (Πανκράτιος) and means "the one that holds everything".

The suggestion that St Pancras Old Church dates back to Roman times has a long tradition, with most suggesting that it was founded in 313 or 314. It is certainly one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in London.

There was almost certainly a church here before the Norman Conquest of 1066. There is no church mentioned in the Domesday Book, but the name is used to refer to property held by the canons of St Paul's Cathedral, so it seems clear that there was a church here by that time. The church possessed a 6th century stone altar said to have been used by St Augustine.

The first documentary record comes from a pair of deeds dated between 1160-1180 in which Ralph de Kentewode confirms grants of land to the church of St Pancras. In 1181 it was given to the Chapter of St Pauls and the parish tithes were used to support a hospital within the Cathedral.

While excavating in the old foundations of the west tower, the workmen stumbled across a trove of treasures, which had probably been hidden there during the course of the English Civil War when the church had been used as military lodgings. Six feet down under the floor of the tower they found an exquisite Elizabethan silver chalice, an Elizabethan/ Jacobean flagon and an Elizabethan paten that is used every Sunday at mass. They also uncovered an altar stone, believed to be from the eleventh century, which was restored to its place in the centre of the High Altar, and still used in the celebration of mass today. It is believed to be the most ancient artefact in Camden.

In the reign of Edward VI (c. 1549) the vicar was a reformer named John Bedstow, who had the peculiar habit of preaching from the branches of a tall tree in the churchyard and saying Mass from a tomb inside the church rather than from the high altar. In the late Elizabethan period it was described as being 'all alone, as utterly forsaken, old and weather-beaten', and in the 17th century it was said to be 'in the fields remote from any house' - something which is hard to imagine today!

By the Civil War, it was utterly deserted, so it comes as no surprise that in 1642 Parliament instructed that the 'deserted church of Pancras' should be used as a lodging for 50 army troopers. It was around this time that the 6th-century altar stone went missing.

The church was rarely used during the 18th century except for burials. When a new church was built in Euston Road in 1822 the Old Church lost its parochial status and became a chapel of ease.

By 1848 the medieval building, which had remained scarcely altered since the 12th century, was in dire condition. Help was at hand; as the City of London expanded in the middle of the 19th century the isolated area north of the old city walls was swallowed up by new development and the decrepit church was no longer isolated at all, but surrounded by the growing city, and the growing population needed churches.

The church was completely restored by the architect AD Gough, who swept away most of the medieval structure, tore down the tower and removed the south porch. When workmen dug under the tower foundations they discovered the 6th-century altar stone, along with the medieval church plate. Presumably, these valuables had been hidden to prevent damage during the time the church was taken over by the Parliamentarian soldiers.

The new building was designed in 12th-century style, with completely new doorways and windows. Gough did retain a section of the north wall, which has been left exposed on the interior so that you can see the 12th-century stonework, which incorporates Roman bricks and pieces of tile.

The churchyard accommodated almost 100,000 burials in the 150 years before it was closed in 1854, including those of Johann Christian Bach, Chevalier D’Eon, John Flaxman, William Franklin, William Godwin, John Polidori and Sir John Soane, whose Grade I listed tomb still stands here. 

When Eliza Soane died 200 years ago, it changed the life of her architect husband Sir John Soane – and it changed the British streetscape through the strange afterlife of the tomb he designed for her, which inspired the design of the iconic red telephone box.

Soane never got over his wife’s death on 22 November 1815 although he lived until 1837. He was one of the most renowned architects of his day – creator of monumental public buildings including the Bank of England, churches, and country houses, as well as an avid collector of fragments of older buildings including Old St Paul’s cathedral. He blamed her death on the shock of discovering that their son George was the author of some malevolent anonymous reviews of his work.

One of the churchyard’s most iconic sights was the “Hardy Tree”. Sadly, the Hardy Tree fell in December 2022 and the surrounding garden is in a state of neglect.

The Hardy Tree was named for the writer, who stacked gravestones around the base of the ash when both man and plant were young in the 1860s.

The tree was surrounded by dozens of headstones that were placed at its base while engineering works were being undertaken on a railway line. It became a prominent image of life among death.

Thomas Hardy, not yet the celebrated writer he would become, was employed as a young architect in the office of Arthur Blomfield, in Covent Garden, London. The firm got the commission from the bishop of London to disinter a large number of graves from Old St Pancras cemetery. The Midland Railway was about to thunder its way through to what is now the Kings Cross–St Pancras station complex and it needed the consecrated earth for its rails.

Hardy received the instruction for mass exhumation and decent reburial elsewhere. The church’s website called the tree a “monument to the railway encroachments of the 19th century”.

And.......he wrote a poem

The Levelled Churchyard

'O Passenger, pray list and catch

            Our sighs and piteous groans,

Half stifled in this jumbled patch

            Of wrenched memorial stones!

'We late-lamented, resting here,

            Are mixed to human jam,

And each to each exclaims in fear,

            "I know not which I am!"

'The wicked people have annexed

            The verses on the good;

A roaring drunkard sports the text

            Teetotal Tommy should!

'Where we are huddled none can trace,

            And if our names remain,

They pave some path or porch or place

            Where we have never lain!

'Here's not a modest maiden elf

            But dreads the final Trumpet,

Lest half of her should rise herself,

            And half some sturdy strumpet!

'From restorations of Thy fane,

            From smoothings of thy sward,

From zealous Churchmen's pick and plane

            Deliver us O Lord! Amen!'

Another notable grave is that of Mary Wollestonecraft, and her husband, William Gladwin. Born 27th April 1759 she was the author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, published 1792. She died 10th September 1797 just ten days after giving birth to a daughter (Mary Shelley 30th August 1797-1st February 1851), who married Percy Bysshe Shelley and who went on to write ‘Frankenstein’. The stone memorial to William and Mary (Wollstonecraft) Godwin was previously further to the East. Their remains are no longer buried here. With the disruption of the railway the family removed them to Bournemouth.

Baroness Burdett Coutts was responsible for the ornate gothic sundial unveiled in 1879. It records on each side many notable figures and their professions including French emigres from the time of the Revolution. Burdett Coutts herself is buried in Westminster Abbey. The name Coutts is familiar as the Queen’s bankers and she lived in Highgate to the North of the former Parish of St Pancras. The sundial is a wondrous sight to behold, with it's stepped plinth and stone animal 'supporters'

Tucked away along the northern side of the Burdett Coutts memorial is a plaque to ‘The English Bach’. Johann Christian Bach was music master to Queen Charlotte, wife of George Ill. Born in Leipzig 1735 he was the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. He died on Tuesday 1st January 1782. With Carl Friedrich Abel (1723 – 1787), also buried in the churchyard, foreign musicians were introduced into London in Bach-Abel Concerts.

Opposite the Coutts sundial, stands a beautiful iron drinking fountain

In the early years of the 21st. century there were further exhumations and reburials due to the building of the HS1 railway line. 

Bizarrely, the archaeologists also found a number of bones belonging to a large walrus. The bones of this huge creature showed signs of being dissected. Evidence of dissected human remains, found in the trenches where paupers’ burials took place, could possibly point to grave robbery.  The mass burial trenches would have been more vulnerable to the attentions of the “resurrection men” than private graves, as it would have been easier to steal remains without detection.  In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens names Old St Pancras as the site of Jerry Cruncher’s grave robbing. 

Just a short walk along Crowndale Road, you reach the Old St. Pancras Church House, dating from 1897, with its' small statue of the boy-saint, carved by Henry Hems. It is now a theatre. 

Walking past the old Church House, you come upon the Working Men's College.

The Working Men's College , which stands in Crowndale Road, not far from St. Pancras Old Church, is among the earliest adult education institutions established in the United Kingdom, and Europe's oldest extant centre for adult education. Founded by Christian socialists, at its inception it was at the forefront of liberal education philosophy.

Founded in 1854 the college was established in Oakley Square by Christian Socialists to provide for Victorian skilled artisans a liberal education, with its ethical focus countering what its founders saw as failings and corruption in the practices of trade self-help associations of the time. The founding of the college was also a response to concerns about the revolutionary potential of the Chartist Movement.

The college opened at 31 Red Lion Square, later moving to Great Ormond Street in 1857, both in Central London. In 1905 it located to its new Crowndale Road building. This new home had been designed by W. D. Caroe. Since 1964 the building has been Grade II listed.

ST.  PANCRAS NEW CHURCH

This  one lies on the other side of the Euston Road. It's another church I couldn't get into, but to be truthful, I'm not impressed enough by it to want to bother. 

Wikipedia says: St Pancras Church is a Greek Revival church in St Pancras, London, built in 1819–22 to the designs of William and Henry William Inwood. The church is one of the most important 19th-century churches in England and is a Grade I listed building.

Well, that's as maybe, but TBH, I think it's an ugly cumbersome thing. It's one redeeming feature are these caryatids on the north and south side. Each caryatid holds a symbolic extinguished torch or an empty jug, appropriate for their positions above the entrances to the burial vault.

The Caryatids are made of Coade - an artificial stone which was developed in the 18th century comprised of a mix of clay, terracotta, silicates, and glass. It was, in fact, a type of ceramic, which once fired produced a hard-wearing artificial stone.

Coade stone soon became popular with sculptors, as it allowed them to create finely detailed ornamentation on buildings. (The exact formula of Coade stone was kept secret and is commonly thought to have died with its inventor, Eleanor Coade, though in fact it was rediscovered in the 1990s.

John Charles Felix Rossi was commissioned to produce eight caryatids, sculpted female figures that serve as architectural supports. (In other words, really fancy pillars.)

Rossi spent three years sculpting the caryatids, only to come across a problem just before he was set to install them at the church. Turned out he had made them too tall to fit between the platforms on which they were to stand and the roof they had to support. Determined that his work would not be wasted due to an error in measurements, Rossi instead cut out part of the torso of each sculpture. The caryatids’ flowing robes enabled him to partially disguise his surgery.

Perhaps the biggest clue to his last-minute adjustments is that the legs of each caryatid are definitely disproportionately long.

Apparently, there is an art gallery in the crypt, and some very strange sculptures in the grounds