St Pancras Old Church

A closed tube station and the wrong bus landed me here at the first parish church ever built in London - St Pancras Old Church. It has been the cite of some interesting events (both historical and fictional.) On the fictional side, Charles Dickens includes it in his A Tale of Two Cities. And historically, it is the place where poet Percy Shelley confessed his undying love for Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the infamous Frankenstein. Another historical, but more modern and much less romantic, fact is that in 1985 satanists attacked the church. A final event of historical significance is recounted below.

These tombstones are jumbled here together (face to face) around a tree as a result of the exhumation of many bodies from a large portion of the churchyard which was cleared (around 1865) to make way for a railway station. Famed author Thomas Hardy was the architect in charge of the (no doubt) dismal task of exhumation. Hence the tree is named the 'Hardy Tree'.