I had an hour to spare before catching a train from King’s Cross and headed north past St Pancras Station in the direction of the Regent’s Canal I knew ran beyond it. And stumbled upon St Pancras Gardens.
I’m not sure how I’ve missed this place but I’d never clapped eyes on it before this visit. I didn’t even know existed. Now in my 33rd year in the city, London still throws up decent sized suprises on a regular basis.
The “Old” St Pancras Church sits within the gardens and in fact the gardens were originally the graveyard of the church. Burials ended in the 1850’s and when the railway was brought into St Pancras it cut a path through the old churchyard in the 1860’s. The land re-opened to the public as a park in the 1870’s to help provide greenery in a rapidly expanding city.
There is a striking Gothic monument in the middle of the gardens which was erected by Baroness Burdett Coutts to commemorate all of the headstones that were lost when the railway came. (She also built the Gothic water fountain in Victoria Park. Gothic was seemingly her thing. And parks.)
Remarkably, the novelistThomas Hardy was involved in the project to move many of the graves away from the new railway line and the unusual arrangement of headstones around one of the trees in the yard, which is featured in the main photograph, above was build while he worked there and is known as the Hardy Tree.
St Pancras Churchyard has many famous connections. Mary Wolstencroft and William Godwin have their memorial here and their daughter, also Mary, when aged only sixteen planned her elopement here to Percy Byshe Shelley. Two years later she came up with an idea for a gothic novel and Frankenstein was born.
Dickens used the gardens as a location, of course. He had body snatchers operating here in A Tale of Two Cities. (He also dedicated Martin Chuzzlewit to Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Dickens gets in everywhere.)
Perhaps my favourite famous moment is the photo-shoot with The Beatles that took place here in 1968. It was part of what became known as the Mad Day Out as the band were photo’d in several locations across the capital on one long summer’s afternoon. Many pictures were taken here including one that I must have looked at more than a thousand times as it graces the inside cover of the Red and Blue albums, the individual Beatles mixed in with a crowd of onlookers.
It was a moist late winter morning when I visited. The sky was blue when I arrived but it had rained in the night and grey clouds would appear while I was there.
It was largely empty apart from several dog walkers and their hounds. A couple of North European tourists were taking selfies next to the Hardy Tree. A large tired looking lady perched against one of the big trees and smoked a fag. And a group of walkers with rucksacks on their backs congregated by the Wolstencoft-Godwin memorial to listen to an thin, austere-looking man in his seventies who clutched a map whilst waving his arms about in communication.
Otherwise I had the place to myself. Not somewhere to sit and ponder in winter but I can imagine it is lovely in summer. I will return.
