St Pancras Old Church

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St Pancras Old Church

St Pancras Old Church
Denomination Church of England
Website www.posp.co.uk
Administration
Parish Old St Pancras
Deanery South Camden
Archdeaconry Hampstead
Episcopal area Edmonton
Diocese London
Province Canterbury
Clergy
Rector Fr Philip North CMP
Vicar(s) Fr James Elston
Fr Paschal Worton
Curate(s) Fr Gavin Cooper SSC
Assistant priest Fr Simon Atkinson

St Pancras Old Church is a Church of England parish church in Somers Town, central London. It is dedicated to the Roman martyr Saint Pancras, and is believed by many to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England. The church is situated on Pancras Road in the London Borough of Camden, with the surrounding area and its international railway station taking its name. St Pancras Old Church, which was largely rebuilt in the Victorian era, should not be confused with St Pancras New Church about a kilometre away, on the Euston Road.

History

St Pancras Old Church in 1815. It was largely reconstructed later in the 19th century. The River Fleet has been covered over.

The parish

Originally, the parish of St Pancras stretched from close to Oxford Street almost to Highgate. In the early Middle Ages there was a centre of population in the vicinity of what is now known as the old church. However, in the 14th century the population abandoned the site and moved to what is now Kentish Town. The reasons for this were probably the vulnerability of the plain around the church to flooding (the River Fleet, which is now underground, runs through it) and the availability of better wells at Kentish Town, where there is less clay in the soil. The church subsequently fell into disrepair. Towards the end of the 18th century, services were only held in the church on one Sunday each month; on other weeks, the same congregation would use a chapel in Kentish Town.[1] It lost its status as the parish church when the New Church on what was to become the Euston Road was consecrated in 1822, and became a chapel of ease.

Early history

Documentary evidence for the early history of the church is scanty, but it is considered by some to have existed since AD 314.[2] This claim is discussed below under Legendary origins. Remnants of medieval features and references in the Domesday Book suggest it pre-dates the Norman Conquest.[3] It was known simply as "St Pancras Church" until — in response to 18th- and 19th-century urban expansion — St Pancras New Church was built a little over half a mile away on the south side of what is now the Euston Road.[4]

Restoration

Interior view of the chancel.
Interior looking west.

As it stood in the early 19th century the church consisted of an unaisled nave, a chancel without a chancel arch and a western tower. The south porch had served as a vestry since the 18th century.

By 1847 the Old Church was derelict, but in view of the growth of population in the southern part of the parish, it was decided to restore it. The architect of the alterations was Alexander Dick Gough. The old tower was removed, allowing the nave to be extended westwards, and a new tower was built on the south side. The south porch was removed, and a new vestry was added on the north side. The whole exterior of the church was refaced or reworked.[3] The enlargement, and the addition of galleries increased the capacity of the church from about 120 to 500.[5]

Answering a query about church in the Building News in 1871, Gough's partner in his architectural practice, Robert Lewis Roumieu wrote:
The old church was principally late Tudor. When it was pulled down to be rebuilt, several small Norman columns, pilaster piers and other remains of a Norman edifice were found among the materials used in the wall, leaving no doubt but that the original church had been a Norman structure which had been at some time completely rebuilt and part used as building material in the reconstruction.[6]

There were further restorations in 1888, in 1925 when the plaster ceiling and the side galleries were removed,[3] and in 1948 following Second World War bomb damage. The building was designated a grade II* listed building on 10 June 1954.[7][8]

Present organisation

The church has a chaplaincy to the nearby St Pancras Hospital and since 1 June 2003 has formed part of the Old St Pancras Team Ministry (which also includes St Michael's Church, Camden Town, St Mary's Church, Somers Town and St Paul's Church, Camden Square).[9] On 11 December 2007 it marked the opening of the nearby St Pancras International station with a bilingual service and a twinning with the Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Paris, near the Gare du Nord, Paris.[10] Currently, the church is in dire need of repairs and in 2013 an official appeals project was launched to raise the £350 000 necessary to preserve the church and grounds for future generations. This includes concerts, a lecture series and a selection of souvenirs related to the church and its history.[11]

Legendary origins

As early as 1593 the cartographer John Norden had commented in his Speculum Britanniae that the dilapidated St Pancras church looked older than St Paul's Cathedral.[12] By the 18th century there seems to have been a local belief that St Pancras was of very great age, perhaps the oldest church in England. The contemporary London historian William Maitland dismissed this as a "vulgar Tradition", and suggested that there was confusion with the ancient church with the same dedication in Canterbury, which was said to have been converted from a pagan temple by St Augustine of Canterbury in 598.[13]

In 1870 local historian Samuel Palmer reported "This old and venerable church is said to be the first Christian place of worship in the county of Middlesex in the eighth or ninth century.".[14] Later attempts to prove an early date for the foundation of the church include the claim by the Revd J. Carter Rendell (vicar 1912-26) that a medieval altar slab marked with five consecration crosses, found during the 19th-century building works, could be dated to the 6th century.[15][16]

An earlier vicar is said to have claimed to have seen in the Vatican Library a manuscript mentioning that St Pancras church was built in the 9th century, and another to have seen a similar document placing the foundation in the 4th century.[15][16]

However, information panels outside the church today state that it "stands on one of Europe’s most ancient sites of Christian worship, possibly dating back to the early 4th century" and has been a "site of prayer and meditation since 314 AD". The case for these claims seems first to have been argued by local historian Charles Lee in 1955, who wrote:

There can be little doubt that a Roman encampment was situated opposite the site of St Pancras Church about this period, and that the church is on the site of a Roman Compitum, which served as a centre of public worship and public meeting... It seems probable that the Roman Compitum at St Pancras was adapted to Christian worship shortly after the restoration of religious freedom in 313 (taking its name from the recently-martyred Pancras).[15]

Lee's "Roman encampment" was "Caesar’s Camp at Pancras called the Brill", identified by the antiquary William Stukeley in the 1750s.[17][18] However, even Stukeley's contemporaries could see no trace of this camp, and considered that Stukeley had let his imagination run away with him.[19] Gillian Tindall has suggested that the lumps and bumps in the fields to the west of the church that Stukeley interpreted as a Roman camp were actually traces of the original medieval village of St. Pancras, before the centre of the settlement moved north to the area now known as Kentish Town.[20]

Lee's use of the word compitum, properly a Roman temple or shrine situated at a crossroads, indicates his indebtedness to the work of Montagu Sharpe (1856–1942), a Middlesex magistrate, former chairman of the Middlesex County Council and amateur historian and archaeologist.[21] Sharpe had proposed, in a book first published in 1919, that the area of the county of Middlesex had in Roman times been subject to the form of land division known as centuriation, marked out by roads in a regular grid pattern covering the whole county.[22] Sharpe noted, when plotting his gridlines, that a number of ancient parish churches appeared to be on or close to intersections, or at least on road alignments. He concluded that these churches must therefore stand on the sites of pagan compita, and represent the deliberate conversion of pagan temples to Christian use by early missionaries to the Middle Saxons in the 7th century. And St Pancras Old Church is one of those marked on Sharpe's map.

Churchyard

Tomb of Sir John Soane

The churchyard, which is the largest green space in the locality, is managed by the London Borough of Camden. It has some fine mature trees, and was restored in the first few years of the 21st century.

The graveyard served not only as a burial place for the parishioners, but also for Roman Catholics from all around London.[23] They included many French refugees, especially priests, who had fled the Revolution.[24] Notable people buried in the churchyard include vampire writer and physician John Polidori, the composer Johann Christian Bach and the sculptor John Flaxman. It is also the burial place of William Franklin, the last colonial Governor of New Jersey and illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. There is a memorial tomb for philosophers and writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, though their remains are now in Bournemouth. In 2009, commemorations of the 250th anniversary of Wollstonecraft's birth were held by various groups, both inside the church[25] and at the gravestone.[26]) In the 17th and 18th centuries, many foreign dignitaries and aristocrats were buried in the graveyard; they are commemorated on an elaborate memorial commissioned by the philanthropist Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts. .

The architect Sir John Soane designed a tomb for his wife and himself in the churchyard, which is now Grade I listed. This mausoleum provided the inspiration for the design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott of the iconic red telephone boxes.

The Hardy Tree, growing between gravestones moved while Thomas Hardy was working here

Other people associated with the churchyard include the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the future Mary Shelley, who planned their 1814 elopement over meetings at the grave of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, mentioned above. Charles Dickens mentions it by name in his 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, making it the location of body-snatching to provide corpses for dissection at medical schools, a common practice at the time. Burials in the churchyard eventually ceased under the Extramural Interment Act in 1854, and St Pancras and Islington Cemetery was opened in East Finchley.[27] In the mid-1860s, the young Thomas Hardy, was in charge of the excavation of part of the graveyard, in the course of the construction of the Midland Railway's London terminus.[28] More burials were removed in 2002

The stone installation by Emily Young and Jeremy Clarke

The churchyard was reopened in June 1877 as St Pancras Gardens, following the movement to allow conversion of disused burial grounds into public gardens. Angela Burdett-Coutts, an important local benefactress, laid the foundation stone of the memorial fountain and sundial she had presented.[29]

A recent addition is a polished marble stone at the entrance to the church, a collaboration between and a gift from the poet Jeremy Clarke and the sculptor Emily Young. It is inscribed: "And I am here / in a place / beyond desire or fear", an extract from the long poem "Praise" by Clarke.

On 28 July 1968, The Beatles were photographed in the churchyard grounds, in a famous series of pictures designed to promote the single "Hey Jude" and the The White Album.

References

  1. ↑ Lysons, Daniel (1795). The Environs of London 3. London. p. 365. 
  2. ↑ Inglis, Angela (2007). Railway Lands: Catching St. Pancras and King's Cross. Troubador. p. 26. ISBN 978-1-906221-40-9. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Percy Lovell and William McB. Marcham, ed. (1938). "St. Pancras Old Church". Survey of London: volume 19: The parish of St Pancras part 2: Old St Pancras and Kentish Town. pp. 72–95. Retrieved 2010-05-26. 
  4. ↑ Then a section of what was simply known as the "New Road". See Palmer 1870, p.32
  5. ↑ Cansick 1869, pp.xiii–xiv
  6. ↑ Building News: 137. 1871. 
  7. ↑ Details from listed building database (477696) . Images of England. English Heritage. accessed 22 January 2009
  8. ↑ "Old Church of St Pancras". National Heritage List for England. English Heritage. Retrieved 31 July 2013. 
  9. ↑ "Parish of Old St Pancras". Retrieved 4 April 2013. 
  10. ↑ "Parishes forge entente cordiale". Camden New Journal. 13 December 2007. 
  11. ↑ St Pancras Old Church Appeals ttp://sosstpancras.org/♙
  12. ↑ Norden, John (1593). Speculum Britanniae: the First Parte: an Historicall, & Chorographicall Discription of Middlesex. [London]. p. 38. 
  13. ↑ Maitland, William (1739). The History of London from its Foundation by the Romans, to the Present Time. London: Samuel Richardson. p. 781. 
  14. ↑ Palmer 1870, p. 23.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 Lee, Charles E. (1955). St Pancras Church and Parish. London: Godart & Co. pp. 7–10. 
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Denyer, C. H. (1935). St Pancras through the Centuries. London: Le Play House Press. p. 13. 
  17. ↑ Stukeley, William (1776). Itinerarium Curiosum 2. London: Baker & Leigh. pp. 1–16. 
  18. ↑ Stukeley's original plan of Caesar's Camp in the British Library "Caesar's Camp at Pancras". Retrieved 4 April 2013. 
  19. ↑ Lysons, Daniel (1795). The Environs of London 3. London. pp. 343–4. 
  20. ↑ Tindall, Gillian (2010). The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village (new ed.). London: Eland. pp. 41–2. ISBN 978-1-906011-48-2. 
  21. ↑ Willment, Diana (2007). Sir Montagu Sharpe: Forgotten Man of Middlesex. Brentford: Dandelion. ISBN 978-0-954-05904-0. 
  22. ↑ Sharpe, Montagu (1919). Middlesex in British, Roman and Saxon Times. London: G. Bell & Sons. pp. 62–77. 
  23. ↑ Palmer 1870, p.27
  24. ↑ Emery, Phil. "End of the line". British Archaeology. Retrieved 29 September 2013. 
  25. ↑ "Tributes to feminist Mary, 250 years on". Camden New Journal. 30 April 2009. 
  26. ↑ Gruner, Peter (17 April 2009). "Festival for first feminist". Islington Tribune. 
  27. ↑ "Family Grows on Trees research into St Pancras area". Family Grows on Trees. 
  28. ↑ Burley, Peter (2012). "When steam railroaded history". Cornerstone 33 (1): 9. 
  29. ↑ "St Pancras Gardens". London Gardens Online. Retrieved 26 August 2012. 

Sources

Further reading

External links

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Coordinates: 51°32′05.63″N 00°07′48.68″W / 51.5348972°N 0.1301889°W / 51.5348972; -0.1301889

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