St Pancras, London

St Pancras is an area of London. For many centuries the name has been used for various officially designated areas, but today it is only an informal term and is rarely used, having been largely superseded by several other terms for overlapping districts.

Ancient parish
St Pancras was originally a medieval parish which ran from close to what is now Oxford Street north as far as Highgate, and from what is now Regent's Park in the west to the road now known as York Way in the east, boundaries which take in much of the current London Borough of Camden, including the central part of it. However, as the choice of name for the borough suggests, St Pancras has lost its status as the central settlement in the area. The district now encompassed by the term St Pancras is not easy to define, and usage of St Pancras as a place name is fairly limited.



The original focus of St Pancras was St Pancras Old Church, which is in the southern half of the parish, and is believed to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in Great Britain. However in the 14th century the population abandoned the site and moved to 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 old settlement was abandoned and the church fell into disrepair. However, some residence continued near the old church as is shown on the 1801 map of the area and in an 18th century landscape that turned up in 2007.

In the 1790s Earl Camden began to develop some fields to the north and west of the Old Church as Camden Town, which has become a better known place name than St Pancras. In the mid 19th century two major railway stations were built to the south of the Old Church, one of them called St Pancras and the other King's Cross. A residential district was built to the south and east of the church, but it is usually known as Somers Town. The term St Pancras is sometimes applied to the immediate vicinity of St Pancras Station, but King's Cross is the usual name for the area around the two mainline stations as a whole.

Metropolitan borough
The parish of St Pancras was administered by a vestry until the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras was established in 1900. In 1965 the former area of the borough was combined with that of two others to form the London Borough of Camden.

Cemeteries
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, St Pancras was famous for its cemeteries, and as well as the grave yard of Old St Pancras Church, it also contained the church yard cemeteries of St James's Church, Piccadilly, St Giles in the Fields, St. Andrew, Holborn, St. George's Church, Bloomsbury, and St George the Martyr Holborn. These were all closed under the Extramural Interment Act in 1854, and so the parish bought new land near East Finchley, so that burials could take place far away from the city at the new St Pancras Cemetery. These deserted cemeteries were left alone for over thirty years until the building of the Midland Railway, meaning bodies and graves had to be removed. The famous author Thomas Hardy was involved in removing many of the graves whilst he was studying architecture. Particularly, he added a number of stones around a tree, now known as "Hardy's Tree". The cemeteries were later disturbed in 2002 - 2003 for construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, but much more care was given to the removal of remains, than in the 19th Century.

Political divisions
The name St Pancras survives in the name of the local parliamentary constituency, Holborn and St. Pancras. One of the political wards in Camden is called St Pancras and Somers Town; however ward boundaries are chosen to divide a borough into roughly equal slices with little regard to historical boundaries or day to day usage. Besides Somers Town and the area around St Pancras Old Church the ward includes much of Camden Town and the former Kings Cross Goods Yard, which is being redeveloped as a mixed use district under the name Kings Cross Central.

Features
Old St Pancras Church and its graveyard have links to Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and the Wollstonecraft circle. Immediately to the north of the churchyard is St Pancras Hospital, formerly the London Hospital for Tropical Diseases. St Pancras is one of the best known railway stations in England. It has been extended and is now the terminus for the Eurostar services through the Channel Tunnel.

Transport

 * Nearest places
 * King's Cross and Somers Town to the north
 * Bloomsbury to the west and south
 * Clerkenwell to the east

The nearest London Underground stations are King's Cross St Pancras tube station and Russell Square. The nearest National Rail stations are London King's Cross and St Pancras railway station.