page_title: St Pancras Old Church
section_title: Churchyard
hierarchical_section_title: St Pancras Old Church / Churchyard
caption_attribution_description: English: Image of the work in stone by Emily Young and Jeremy Clarke installed in St Pancras Old Church, London, in June 2009
context_page_description: 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 860 metres away, on Euston Road.
context_section_description: 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. They included many French refugees (émigrés), especially priests, who had fled the Revolution, one of them the spy Chevalier d'Éon.  Notable people buried in the churchyard include the notorious colonial administrator Joseph Wall who was executed for cruelty in 1802, vampire writer and physician John Polidori, the composers Carl Friedrich Abel and Johann Christian Bach, the eighteenth son of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the sculptor John Flaxman. William Franklin, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, and last colonial Governor of New Jersey was interred here in 1814.  There is a spousal 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 and at the gravestone. In the 17th and 18th centuries, many foreign dignitaries and aristocrats were buried in the graveyard; they are commemorated on the Burdett-Coutts Memorial Sundial, an elaborate memorial commissioned by the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts.
  The architect 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 Giles Gilbert Scott of the iconic red telephone boxes.
  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.  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. More burials were removed in 2002.
  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 sundial she had presented.
  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.
caption: The stone installation by Emily Young and Jeremy Clarke
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