St Pancras Old Church claims to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in the world. With the original graveyard design dating back to the church’s Saxon period, it must be regarded as one of the oldest Christian burial places in England.

Many French refugees who had fled the Revolution were buried here. Many foreign dignitaries and aristocrats were buried in the graveyard - they are commemorated on the Burdett-Coutts Memorial Sundial placed here.

The architect John Soane designed a tomb for his wife and himself in the churchyard. This mausoleum may have provided the inspiration for the design by Giles Gilbert Scott of the iconic red telephone boxes.

Mary Wollstonecraft was originally buried here, though her remains now lie in Bournemouth.

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley planned their 1814 elopement over meetings at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft - her mother.

Charles Dickens mentioned Old St Pancras churchyard in his 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, making it the location of body snatching to provide corpses for dissection at medical schools.

Gloomy 19th-century novelist Thomas Hardy had, between 1862 and 1867, trained as an architect at King’s College. He was apprenticed to Arthur Blomfield.

And Arthur Blomfield was commissioned to supervise the exhumation of human remains and the dismantling of tombs in the churchyard to make way for the extension of the Midland Railway to its new terminus. Blomfield passed the job on to 25-year-old Hardy.

Hardy spent hours in the churchyard overseeing the removal of bodies and tombs from the land designated for the new railway. He stacked headstones around an ash tree and over the years, the tree grew around them.

The Hardy Tree - as it became known - fell down in December 2022.

The churchyard was reopened in June 1877 as St Pancras Gardens.

On 28 July 1968, The Beatles were photographed in the churchyard grounds on their so-called "Mad Day Out", in a series of pictures designed to promote the single "Hey Jude".



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