LONDON'S HARDY TREE FALLS
One of Britain’s legendary trees was felled by winter storms in December. The Hardy Tree in St Pancras Churchyard in central London was an ash tree surrounded by close-packed gravestones uprooted from elsewhere in the churchyard. It gets its name from the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy.
In the 1860s, when Hardy was in his early 20s and not yet a writer, he worked as an architect for the prestigious London practice of Arthur Broomfield. Broomfield had the commission from the Bishop of London to disinter and rebury a large number of graves in Old St Pancras cemetery as part of the work to build the station, whose tracks now run immediately behind the wall near which the tree stood, and Hardy was given the job of overseeing the work onsite. Once the bodies were removed and reburied elsewhere, Hardy is said to have had the gravestones stacked around the young ash standing in the remaining part of the graveyard (see FT375:19-20).
Over the years, the tree had grown round and enclosed some of the gravestones, creating a romantic and somewhat gothic spectacle popular with visitors seeking alternative London landmarks; the church’s website called the tree a “monument to the railway encroachments of the 19th century”.
The end of the tree was not unexpected; it was found to be suffering from fungus in 2014 and since then Camden Council had been managing its decline, trimming back its crown to minimise stresses and fencing
Over the years the tree had grown round some of the gravestones
the area off, but December’s high winds hastened its demise.
However, there is considerable doubt that the tree actually has any connection to Hardy. While he did oversee the exhumation work on the site, his was not a hands-on role. That was left to the clerk of works, and Hardy’s job was to briefly visit the site each evening to monitor what he had been doing. More damningly, amateur historian David Bingham has found photographs showing the circle of gravestones in 1926, with absolutely no sign of a tree in the centre, and indeed believes the circular arrangement itself only dates to 1877, when the graveyard became a public park. Ash trees are extremely fast growing, so one would have had no problem sprouting in the centre of the gravestones and reaching maturity between 1926 and the first mentions of the Hardy story, which Bingham can date back no further than an Iain Sinclair reference in 1997. Old St Pancras Churchyard, though, still remains fabled as the site of assignations between the poet Shelley and his future wife Mary, which took place at the grave of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and as the location of the Soane family mausoleum, reputed to be the inspiration for the design of the classic British phone box. theguardian.com, 29 Nov; BBC News, 28 Dec 2022; thelondondead.blogspot.com.