17th November 2023

In his 1952 memoir, the Poet Laureate John Masefield describes the gardens at St Pancras Old Church as, “The churchyard of romance.” This recollection indicates his awareness of the many poets and writers who, over the years, have wandered there. To mention William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Thomas Chatterton, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Aidan Dun is to name but a few.

In Masefield’s lifetime, just as in mine, there was a need to make a distinction between two churches with similar names in close proximity, to avoid confusion. One is St Pancras Parish Church built in 1822, which backs on to WB Yeats’s old building in Bloomsbury. And the other, St Pancras Old Church, set in a cemetery garden lined with magnificent London Planes, a stone’s throw from Kings Cross and St Pancras Stations.

It was the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, once a junior architect, who was charged with re-designing St Pancras Gardens in 1865. A magnificent Ash, now sadly fallen, was named The Hardy Tree by the contemporary poet Aidan Dun aka The Bard of Kings Cross. The tree stood at the west of the churchyard under which Hardy unceremoniously dumped the scores of gravestones displaced for the expansion of the burgeoning Midland Railways, where they remain today.

Probably the most romantic story surrounding the old church is that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who happened upon the teenage Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley the author of Frankenstein, as she mourned at the graveside of her mother, the prima-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The young lovers famously eloped causing a scandal from which Mary, her father William Godwin, who was already under scrutiny for his radical publications and Shelley, still married to his first wife, would never fully recover from.  

A tragic tale is that of the young poet Thomas Chatterton who fell into a freshly dug grave whilst walking in St Pancras Gardens. His friend who hauled him out said he was glad to resurrect a genius. Chatterton replied that the grave had been troubling him for some while now. Three days later, on the 24th August 1770, Chatterton committed suicide by drinking arsenic. He was just 17 years and 9 months old.  

Another teenager associated with St Pancras is Saint Pancras himself. He was a 14 year old orphan beheaded in Rome in 303AD by the Emperor Diocletian for his intractable Christian beliefs. Pancras, whose name translates as ‘the one who holds everything,’ is the patron saint of children, jobs and health. The cult of St Pancras was spread by the monk Augustine who arrived on the murky shores of Kent with relics from the tomb of the young martyr from Rome. His mission was the successful conversion of King Ethelbert to Christianity around 600AD.

Originally thought to be built on the site of a Celtic shrine or even a Roman place of worship, cogent clues are embedded in the fabric of the church. A 6th Century altar stone, silver artefacts and remnants of Roman tiles were recovered by builders replacing the Norman bell tower in 1847. It is believed these relics were hastily secreted during the Civil Wars before Cromwell’s troops arrived to convert the church into barracks and to rest the horses. 

Tomb Raiders, Footpads and Duals

In the 1700s, a dark underbelly to the parish of St Pancras was energing. The churchyard was plagued by a gang of bodysnatchers known as The Resurrectionists. The gang’s headquarters in Battlebridge, later known as Kings Cross, was close enough for them to watch the burials and “fish’ the fresh stream of bodies. The dug up cadavers were sold on to medical schools for surgical dissection. Eventually, a team of fierce dogs were trained to guard the grounds and let loose at night to deter the tomb robbers.

Another scourge of the parish were the masked robbers on horseback. A band of three Highwaymen robbed a young woman in her horse and cart on her way home. When her father in law ventured out to find them, he was robbed too. On Christmas Day in 1729 a single rider on a black horse relieved two gentlemen of sixty guineas and two watches. He was a familiar sight passing through St Pancras from the turnpike on Tottenham Court Road, and likely to have been the infamous Dick Turpin, en route to his hideout at The Spaniard's Inn on Hampstead Lane.

Other transgressors without horses known as footpads armed with guns or cutlasses patrolled the parish mugging and even murdering victims. In 1772 the Newcastle coach was stopped four times in a fortnight by a single footpad. On his fifth attempt to rob the coach armed with double barrelled pistols near St Pancras he met with a sticky end when he was shot by a passenger and later died at the Middlesex Hospital. 

Aside from the armed muggers, disagreements frequently led to duals with the majority ending with both parties missing their aim. Earl Ferrers became the last nobleman to be hanged at Tyburn in 1760 after fatally shooting his land steward during an argurment. His lifeless body was taken for dissection by surgeons in a public lecture, the remains buried under the Belfry at St Pancras. 

Despite the emerging dangers there was a salubrious side to the parish. For centuries swimming and fishing had been commonplace activities in the River Fleet, which still runs in a culvert underneath the busy street outside the church. The mineral rich waters drawn from the Wells of St Pancras in the 1800s were advertised as curing everything from violent colds and vapours to running sores and cancers. The waters were highly prized by the wealthy merchants of London for its safe drinking, and bottled by Bristows of Fleet Street could be delivered for six shillings per dozen bottles to anywhere in the city.

A cluster of London’s hospitals were founded within the boundary of the old parish. St Pancras Hospital dates from 1793 and still overlooks the lovely gardens, as does the Coroners Court. When the singer Cheryl Cole became seriously ill after contracting malaria in 2010 she was successfully treated in the Tropical Diseases unit. The treatment of domestic animals was administered by The Royal Veterinary College, once surrounded by open country, which opened in 1791, where until recently students practiced on live farm animals kept in the backyard.

In 1873, the teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud lived for a year with the older poet Paul Verlaine next door to the vets on Royal College Street. It was during a waking vision in St Pancras that the spirit of Rimbaud ‘dictated’ Aidan Dun’s epic 700 triads poem Vale Royal, which he premiered at the Albert Hall in 1995. Dun’s lines, “Kings Cross, dense with angels and histories, there are cities beneath your pavements, cities behind your skies. Let me see!” are inscribed in granite across the pavement of the newly developed Granary Square.

A Mad Day in The Garden

The most impressive mausoleum in the garden belongs to the architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837). His rare collection of artefacts are safely stored in his house museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a delight for visitors today. Sadly, his telephone box shaped tomb hewn from Portland stone was vandalised several times over the years. In 1968, the Beatles worked themselves into the mythology of St Pancras Old Church on what they described as their, “Mad Day.” Photos show the Fab Four lounging around Soane’s tomb, larking amongst the flowerbeds and stood under the carved stone archway into to the old church.

The gravestone of Mary Wollstonecraft still stands, although her remains were removed to Bournemouth to lie with her husband, daughter, grandson and the heart of the drowned poet Percy Shelley. Mary had been a single mother living in Paris writing influential reports about the socio-political upheavals during the French Revolution. She returned to London to live a stone’s throw from St Pancras Old Church, where she was married in 1797. Her presence may be why the area became a destination for so many French emigres.  

Amongst the exiles was the intriguing Chevalier d’Eon, a cross dressing spy and non-gender conforming diplomat living his later years in London, legally recognised as Charlotte d’Eon. A trained solider, the Chevalier had a penchant for voluminous dresses and lace caps which he wore to publicly demonstrate his formidable swordsmanship against all comers. Highly attractive as a youth in drag, he drew the attention of Casanova and convinced both the Empress Elizabeth of Russia and Louis XV, effectively his boss, to officially recognise him as a female.

The imposing Burdett-Coutts memorial in the form of a sundial enshrines the names of many of the displaced burial plots, including the Chevalier's. At its base, in each corner of a grassy knoll, sits a stone animal on a low plinth: two dogs and two lions. In the1980’s, the garden was a favourite playground in the terrain of my youth acting as a sort of portal into a mysterious world linking past, present and future.  

It wasn’t long before I noticed one dog, like Saint Pancras, had been decapitated, its head languishing on the ground beside it. After years of no civic remediation, and with the help of my neighbour Michael Smith, we took a bucket of cement to the gardens and rejoined the head to the body - a job which holds good to this day.  

The ongoing development by Midland Railway soon swamped our home at nearby Stanley Buildings.This time it was for the development of St Pancras International and The Channel Tunnel in the 1990’s. Four buildings originally designed by Sir Sidney Waterlow for the influx of the nineteenth century railway workers have been demolished over time. By some miracle my building with its spiral staircase winding to four floors and a flat roof encased in criss-cross wrought iron balconies survives as offices at 7 Pancras Square.