OTHER NEWS St. Pancras Old Church – links with Dorset If you are waiting for a train at St. Pancras and you have time to kill, as we had recently, we recommend you look at the nearby St. Pancras Old Church. The current churchyard is quite small but, for those who do not know it, has some surprising and fascinating features. Here are a few you would come across.
The tree growing over a large pile of stacked gravestones it is known as the ‘Hardy Tree’. In the late 1800s, much of the original graveyard was converted to a goods yard as part of the expansion of the nearby railway. Thomas Hardy was employed by the architect as an overseer for managing the disinterment of the human remains. There is a stone memorial to Mary Wollestonecraft, the campaigner for women’s rights, who died in 1797, just ten days after giving birth to a certain future authoress, Mary Shelley. (With the disruption of the railway, the family removed her and her husband’s actual remains to Bournemouth.) There is also a magnificent mausoleum designed by Sir John Sloane, the celebrated architect of many well-known buildings, including the Bank of England. 52
The mausoleum was erected in 1816 after his wife Elizabeth’s death and entombs his wife and son as well as Sloane himself. It was interesting to read that the central domed structure influenced Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s design of the K2 and subsequent telephone kiosks. The mausoleum is one of only two Grade 1 listed monuments in London (the other being Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate). And don’t forget to visit the church itself! Ian Wood
Stanchester Quire
Stanchester Quire is a community choir which I set up some 27 years ago. We draw members from Somerset, Dorset and Devon. The essence of a community choir is that there is no audition, no requirement to read music and no experience is necessary, just a desire to sing with other people. Our choir is unique in that we specialise in songs from the southwest of England. Our next practice season starts on Monday 5 September. We meet at 7.30pm in the David Hall in South
