St Pancras Churchyard, Kings Cross

I was in London today on a little tour of wells and springs (and the sites of lost ones). My starting point was Old St Pancras church, which used to have its own well in the vicinity, long since swept away in the changes made to the area when the railway terminus was built in 1868. Given that this will be the starting point of another walk for the LGMG, I was pleased to find the churchyard is such a Gothic place. There is the wonderfully flamboyant sundial memorial to that great Victorian philanthropist, Baroness Burdett-Coutts ...

...; there is the grave of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; there is the mausoleum of Sir John Soane; and in one corner is the Hardy Tree.

The architect responsible for supervising the work preparing for the creation of the station in the 1860s was Arthur Blomfield. He had little stomach for clearing the graveyard of Old St Pancras, and gave that task to his young assistant to handle, a young Dorset chap called Thomas Hardy. It must have fitted his temperament admirably. The story goes that Hardy planted an ash sapling near the edge of the graveyard, or rather what remained of it, and arranged some of the now-superfluous gravestones around it. The plaque on the fence around the Hardy Tree doesn't go that far, stating only that the stones 'were probably moved around that time'; but the tree has clearly had time to grow around some of the nearest stones. The site has a strange beauty, and a moving quality as a memorial to all those souls whose remains were disturbed by the construction work - perhaps this was Hardy silently acknowledging a debt, and not just to them but also to all the poor inhabitants of the Somers Town and Agar Town slums who were summarily turfed out by the landlords after the Midland Railway bought the land. Hardy would have paid them grim notice as well.