A ramble to St Pancras on an unholy holiday

Thursday is St Pancras station’s patronal feast. The station, of course, is named after the parish church, through the churchyard of which the railway was built. That old church (about which I wrote a couple of years ago) survives, along with its bigger successor beside the busy Euston Road.

Pope St Gregory had given Benedictine monks the use of the church of St Pancras in Rome after the Lombards sacked Montecassino in 580. Gregory sent the monk St Augustine of Canterbury to Christianise England in 597. We don’t know if he brought with him relics of St Pancras (below, on a 14th-century altarpiece), but certainly Pope Vitalian sent some as a gift to King Oswiu of Northumberland in 665.

Unlike the citizens of Madrid, who, as depicted by Goya, traditionally flocked in mid-may to the meadows of San

Isidro on the banks of the Manzanares (where there is still a shrine and a park for picnics), holiday outings in the parish of St Pancras lost any connection with the Roman martyr to whom the church is dedicated.

Until recently, St Pancras parish ran from Oxford Street five miles north to Highgate. Its population of about

300 at the time of the Conquest reached 200,000 before the Second World War. In the 18th century, its open fields attracted Londoners with time for leisure. Public houses, pleasure gardens and less reputable resorts grew up to meet their demands.

West of Tottenham Court Road lay four fields: Crab Tree Field, Walnut Tree Field, Culver Close (a meadow) and Home Field (next to today’s Euston Road, built in 1757 as the New Road to bypass congested Oxford Street). Tottenham Court Road has nothing to do with Tottenham in east London, but takes its name from the manor of Tottenhall (west of the Kentish Town Road) an endowment of a prebend of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Haphazard details of life in St Pancras parish come from court cases. The parish officers in 1701 were each fined 20 shillings for not erecting and repairing a pair of stocks and a ducking stool. The proprietors of the Hampstead Waterworks were fined £10 for letting pipes leak on to the highway.

In 1703, there came out an anonymous pamphlet called

The Holiday-ramble: Or, a Walk to Pancridge. The narrator rambles to Tottenham Court, where the old manor house stood (its pond where the present Tolmer’s Square is) and through St Pancras fields. The Adam and Eve tavern depicted in Hogarth’s The March to Finchley (1750), west of Hampstead Road, was not the old manor house as often said. But the brothel in Hogarth’s

painting gives a taste of the neighbourhood.

The jog-trot poem is only eight pages long but manages to be tedious, offering lasciviousness without delivering details. But it has a few fairly jolly lines on the holiday season:

When Roger and Kate do their liberty take,

And seal up the Match o’er a Pot and a Cake;

When Bully and Punk from their Mansions repair,

And Solace themselves on their Food, the fresh air.

In those days, bully meant a gallant, and punk a loose woman.

Pancras in the form of

Pancridge (as it was pronounced by Dickens’s Sarah Gamp) for a time gave a name to a Pancridge parson, one ready, in the Jacobean period, to conduct instant weddings – I’m not sure whether validly.

Pancridge parson did not enjoy a long life and didn’t find its way into the Oxford English Dictionary.

In later days, the morals of the vast parish no doubt continued to vary, beside railways and under chimneypots, instead of in the fields and under hedgerows.