St. Pancras and Somers Town
Links
St Pancras International - the station's official site which is full of beautiful pictures and fascinating facts.
BBC St Pancras International - a slighty different history of the station
St Pancras Workhouse - details about the Workhouse from the wonderful Workhouse site.
Vision of Britain - the usual collection of statistics, writings, etc.
British History Online - From Old and New London dated 1878 a history of St. Pancras
Camden Council - a list of records for St Pancras held in the Camden archives.
I am not quite a Londoner - I grew up in the Eastern suburbs, but I did visit London a lot and also worked there for a time. I am therefore quite familiar with it, but I realised as I set out to write William Henry Warner's story that I really did not know this part of London at all. I don't recall ever visiting it - and yet this is the area which houses St. Pancras station, the British Museum, the British Library and significant parts of London university not to mention Pentonville prison and Bloomsbury. So I am looking forward to learning a little about it.
The wonderful painting above is housed in the Museum of London and is by John O'Connor. It is entitled From Pentonville Road, Looking West: Evening. So I don't think the foreground is really St. Pancras, but the impressive building at the back is St Pancras station and its hotel. As lately as the year 1745, there were only two or three houses near the church, and twenty years later the population of the parish was under six hundred. At the first census taken in the present century it had risen to more than 35,000, and in 1861 it stood at very little under 200,000. There has, however, been a decrease since that time on account of the extensive clearances made for the terminus of the Midland Railway, of which we shall speak presently.