Qualla: St Pancras Old Church

St Pancras Old Church: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matt Brown from London, England, CC BY 2.0. Some places in London were old before London was London. St Pancras Old Church, tucked behind a Victorian Gothic railway terminus on what was once a marshy floodplain of the River Fleet, may be one of them. Information panels outside the building today claim a site of prayer and meditation since 314 AD, in the late Roman period - a claim that earnest historians have spent two centuries either trying to prove or trying to debunk. What is certain is this: when the church was rebuilt in 1847, workmen pulled re-used Roman tiles out of the medieval tower walls, and an inscribed altar stone they uncovered has been dated to around AD 625. That puts the foundation, at the earliest, within a generation of Augustine of Canterbury's mission to convert the Saxons. Most parish churches in Britain claim to be ancient. This one, dedicated to a 14-year-old Roman boy executed for his faith under Diocletian, has an unusually strong claim to be among the oldest.

Read more: St Pancras Old Church on Qualla

Image: Matt Brown from London, England | CC BY 2.0

St Pancras Old Church: Older Than St Paul's

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Edgar, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1593 the cartographer John Norden noticed something walking past the dilapidated little church and made a note of it in his Speculum Britanniae. The St Pancras building, he wrote, looked older than St Paul's Cathedral. Norden was right; old St Paul's, which the Great Fire woul...

Read more: St Pancras Old Church on Qualla

Image: David Edgar | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Pancras Old Church: The Last Mass and the French Refugees

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pru.mitchell, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the early modern period the church had become unusual for a different reason. After the Reformation made Catholic worship illegal in England, St Pancras Old Church kept a quiet tradition - it was said that the last bell which tolled for the Mass in England was rung here. And S...

Read more: St Pancras Old Church on Qualla

Image: Pru.mitchell | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Pancras Old Church: Mary and Percy at the Grave

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the early summer of 1814, a young woman of sixteen named Mary Godwin began meeting in this churchyard with a married poet five years her senior. His name was Percy Bysshe Shelley. The grave they met beside belonged to Mary's mother - the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who ha...

Read more: St Pancras Old Church on Qualla

Image: Stephen McKay | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Pancras Old Church: The Hardy Tree

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the mid-1860s, the construction of the Midland Railway's London terminus at St Pancras station required cutting through the northern end of the churchyard. The young man in charge of overseeing the disinterment of graves was a Dorset-born architectural assistant named Thomas H...

Read more: St Pancras Old Church on Qualla

Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Pancras Old Church: Songs from a Small Church

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Craven, CC BY-SA 2.0. The building you see today was rebuilt in 1847 by architect Alexander Dick Gough, who removed the old western tower, extended the nave, and built a new tower on the south side. Further restorations followed under Arthur Blomfield in 1888. The church is small inside - just a stone...

Read more: St Pancras Old Church on Qualla

Image: Stephen Craven | CC BY-SA 2.0