St Pancras Old Church, Camden

St Pancras Old Church is a Church of England parish church on Pancras Road in Somers Town, in the London Borough of Camden, dedicated to the Roman boy-martyr St Pancras, patron saint of children, and reputed to be one of the very oldest sites of Christian worship in England. Standing in the largest green space of its neighbourhood, behind St Pancras International station, the modest Grade II* listed building, largely rebuilt by the Victorians, carries traditions, burials and literary associations out of all proportion to its size, and should not be confused with the grand St Pancras New Church of 1819-22 on Euston Road, less than a kilometre away.

The age of the site is a tangle of tradition and tantalising evidence. By the eighteenth century there was a local belief that the church was of immense antiquity; information panels today state that it stands on one of Europe's most ancient sites of Christian worship, possibly a place of prayer since AD 314 in the Roman era, and a Victorian vicar claimed to have seen a document in the Vatican Library placing the foundation in the fourth century. The local historian Charles Lee argued in 1955 that a Roman encampment stood opposite the church, identifying the site as a Roman compitum, a crossroads shrine converted to Christian worship soon after the restoration of religious freedom in 313 and named for the recently martyred Pancras; but Lee's "Caesar's Camp at Pancras, called the Brill" rested on the imagination of the eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley, whose contemporaries could see no trace of it, and Gillian Tindall has suggested the earthworks Stukeley saw were really the remains of the deserted medieval village of St Pancras. Another tradition ties the church to the mission of St Augustine, sent to England by Pope Gregory the Great in 597 carrying relics of St Pancras, whose first church at Canterbury bore the saint's name; the eighteenth-century historian William Maitland dismissed the link as "vulgar Tradition", but archaeology has been kinder to an early date than he was. The Victorian rebuilding of 1847 revealed Roman tiles reused in the fabric of the tower and an inscribed altar stone dated to around AD 600-625, suggesting a possible early seventh-century foundation; a medieval altar slab with five consecration crosses was argued by one vicar to be as early as the sixth century; and the original cemetery around the church was sub-circular, like many late Saxon burial grounds. What is certain is that the church existed by the eleventh century, being among the few mentioned in the Domesday Book, and that as early as 1593 the cartographer John Norden remarked that the dilapidated St Pancras looked older than St Paul's Cathedral. The first recorded vicar, Fulcherius, was appointed in 1181.

The medieval church served a vast ancient parish stretching from near Oxford Street north to Highgate. The demolition of 1847 showed the old building to be mainly late Tudor, but built from the wreckage of its predecessors: the architect Robert Lewis Roumieu recorded that small Norman columns, pilaster piers and other remains of a Norman edifice were found reused in the walls. In the fourteenth century the local population drifted north to Kentish Town, driven by the flooding of the plain around the church, through which the now-buried River Fleet runs, and by better wells in the less clayey ground; the church was left increasingly isolated. After the Reformation its remoteness and decay made it a haven for Catholics, and it was said that the last bell that tolled for the Mass in England rang at St Pancras. With Paddington, it became one of only two places in London where Roman Catholics were permitted burial, and the churchyard filled with Catholic dead from across the capital, including many French priests and émigrés fleeing the Revolution. By the late eighteenth century services were held only one Sunday a month, and when the capacious St Pancras New Church was consecrated on Euston Road in 1822, the old building lost its parish status and became a chapel of ease.

By 1847 the Old Church was derelict, but the growing population of the southern parish prompted a thorough Victorian remaking by the architect Alexander Dick Gough: the old tower was removed so the nave could be extended westward, a new tower was built on the south side, a new vestry added on the north, the whole exterior refaced, and galleries raised the capacity from about 120 to 500. Further restorations followed under Arthur Blomfield in 1888, with a reredos by C. E. Buckeridge, in 1925 when the plaster ceiling and side galleries were removed, and in 1948 after Second World War bomb damage. Inside, against the east wall, lies the grave of Samuel Cooper, the great seventeenth-century miniaturist.

It is the churchyard, reopened in 1877 as St Pancras Gardens, that holds the church's most extraordinary company. Here lie the composers Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Johann Sebastian, his name misspelled "John Cristian Back" in the burial register, and his friend Carl Friedrich Abel; the sculptor John Flaxman; the vampire writer and physician John William Polidori, author of "The Vampyre"; William Franklin, illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin and last colonial Governor of New Jersey; the Chevalier d'Éon, spy and fencer; the criminal Jonathan Wild; and Joseph Wall, the colonial governor hanged in 1802 for flogging a soldier to death. The philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin had their memorial tomb here, and over that grave the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the young Mary Godwin, the future Mary Shelley, planned their elopement of 1814, though the couple's remains were later moved to Bournemouth. The architect Sir John Soane designed the Grade I listed mausoleum for his wife and himself that still stands in the gardens, and its domed canopy is believed to have inspired Giles Gilbert Scott's design for the iconic red telephone box. Dickens set a body-snatching scene of A Tale of Two Cities in this churchyard, and in the mid-1860s the young Thomas Hardy, then an architect's assistant, supervised the grim exhumation of part of the burial ground for the building of the Midland Railway into St Pancras station; the tree around which displaced gravestones were stacked is known as the Hardy Tree. When the northern half of the churchyard became a public park in 1877, the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts presented the elaborate Memorial Sundial recording names whose stones had been lost, among them the Corsican hero Pasquale Paoli, later reinterred in Corsica, the physicist Tiberius Cavallo, the architect Giacomo Leoni and the lexicographer John Walker. Legend adds that the doomed poet Thomas Chatterton fell into a freshly dug grave here three days before his death in 1770, remarking that he had "been at war with the grave some time".

The church's modern life keeps the old ground lively. On 28 July 1968 the Beatles were photographed in the churchyard during their "Mad Day Out" promoting "Hey Jude", commemorated by a plaque on a memorial bench; Lene Lovich filmed her 1979 video "Bird Song" in the church; and since 2011 the intimate building has become a celebrated concert venue for singer-songwriters, hosting Sinéad O'Connor, Laura Marling, Brian Eno, Sam Smith, Tom Odell, Agnes Obel and many others. The church marked the opening of St Pancras International in December 2007 with a bilingual service and a twinning with the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul near the Gare du Nord in Paris, and maintains a chaplaincy to St Pancras Hospital. A traditional Anglo-Catholic parish receiving alternative episcopal oversight from the Bishop of Fulham, it greets visitors at its entrance with a marble stone carved by Emily Young bearing words from Jeremy Clarke's poem "Praise": "And I am here / in a place / beyond desire or fear" — a fitting inscription for a site where prayer may have been offered for seventeen centuries.