Somers Town is crammed between the two railway termini of Euston and St Pancras International from which the area has taken heavy influence.
John Somers, Lord Chancellor and Baron Somers of Evesham attained the local freehold of Brill Farm during the wind-up of the 17th century. A century later, saw Frenchman Jacob Leroux lease the farm from the Somers family with plans for development of it into what is now known as Somers Town.
The British Library was opened in 1998 replacing the site of the old Somers Town Milk & Fish depot. It was a massive distribution centre housing fresh goods brought into London early each morning by train from the Midlands countryside. The library today is famous for its red bricked exterior.
The area is extremely well connected for transport county-wide with almost half of all Tube lines serving it within walking distance aswell as two of London’s termini, Euston and Kings Cross.
The Cock Tavern of the 1930s is traditionally an Irish pub now used by older local patrons as a sort of community front room. The building is Grade II listed as part of Walker House on the Ossulston Estate.
This Oakshott Court block of council flats was originally the site of a fifteen-sided building from 1784 known as the Polygon. Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to her daughter here – Mary Shelly, the author of Frankenstein. Charles Dickens also spent a portion of his childhood in the building.
St Pancras Old Church, an Anglo-Catholic tradition Church of England, has its history tracked as far back as the Norman Conquest of the 11th & 12th century. At the north side of the building, you can see part of the exposed Norman masonry, despite the building having been restored a few times since 1847.
To make way for the introduction of St Pancras Station, Victorian classic novelist Thomas Hardy, author of ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ was given the gruesome task of digging up the dead bodies in the graveyard for burial elsewhere. Supposedly at a loose end with dozens of leftover gravestones; he arranged for an ash tree to be encircled with them overlapping each other around the roots. This is the Hardy Tree, which fell down during 2022.
The Francis Crick Institute of 2016, adds a modern touch. It has become world class as a leading research centre in the UK surrounding biomedical science.