St Pancras Old Church, Camden
— — a quiet older church behind the big new one.
Not only on a wall.
“A small stone church on the old Roman road north out of London. The Normans built on a Saxon foundation, and the Victorians rebuilt on the Normans; the result reads humbler than its age. Mary Wollstonecraft is remembered in the churchyard. The Hardy Tree stood here, ringed by displaced gravestones, until it came down in 2022.
St Pancras Old Church, Camden, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
St Pancras Old Church sits on Pancras Road in Camden, a few minutes north of St Pancras International station. Tradition holds the site as one of the oldest places of Christian worship in England, with a possible foundation as early as the fourth century. The present fabric is largely a Victorian rebuild by Roumieu and Gough, completed in 1848, around a Norman core. The graveyard was partly cleared in the 1860s for the Midland Railway extension, the work supervised by a young Thomas Hardy before his architectural career gave way to fiction.
The chancel arch and parts of the nave wall carry Norman masonry, with reused Roman tile visible in the older sections. The Soane Mausoleum stands a short walk from the church door, raised by Sir John Soane in 1816 for his wife Eliza; its shallow pantile dome and squared canopy later shaped Giles Gilbert Scott's design for the K2 telephone kiosk, the red box still seen on London streets. Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin were both first buried in the churchyard, though their remains were later moved to Bournemouth.
The church keeps shorter hours than the main parish church a mile south; it usually opens for daily prayer and a Sunday morning service, with the churchyard accessible during park hours. Entry is free. The gates sit on Pancras Road opposite the British Library's St Pancras Gardens, a five-minute walk from St Pancras International and King's Cross. The displaced gravestones once ringed an ash known as the Hardy Tree, which fell in December 2022 after years of slow decline and remains a marked spot in the yard.