Old Saint Pancras cemetery
If you like the Gothic – that is, the macabre, rather than the medieval style – there’s no better place to visit in London than Old Saint Pancras cemetery.
Huge trees shade the place; in winter, their trunks are stark, and you can hear their twigs rattling above you. Sometimes one hurtles down, blown off by a gust of wind. Behind loom tall brick tenements, bare and gloomy like Scottish castles. And everywhere, of course, are gravestones. Just take a stormy sky and the threat of rain, and you could fancy yourself on the set of a horror film.
Both the railway and the canal are close – Thomas Hardy, in his first career as an architect before he discovered his gift for writing, worked on the railway and apparently had to rebury bones that were dug up in the process. But despite that, this place seems hidden away. It goes back to before the Norman Conquest, and perhaps you can sense that in the atmosphere, though there’s nothing medieval left here now.
There are some fascinating people buried in this cemetery. Mary Wollstonecraft, early feminist, was buried here with her husband William Godwin; you can still see the monument, though the bodies were moved some time ago. Sculptor John Flaxman, England’s greatest neoclassical artist, is buried in a vault here. So is the Chevalier d’Eon, a French transvestite and spy.
There’s one tomb here that’s particularly interesting – it’s that of Sir John Soane, the architect who built the Bank of England and the fine house on Lincoln’s Inn Fields that is now the Soane Museum. It’s typical of Soane in the way it takes reserved classical forms, but uses them to create a memorable and quite distinctive outline.
Look carefully and you’ll see he has also used some interesting symbolism. Besides the little weeping figures, which are typical of Neoclassical sculpture, he’s added the ouroboros – the snake which eats its own tail, and is a symbol of eternity – and pineapples.
It’s an elegant piece that doesn’t seem particularly gloomy – the only thing around here that is, instead, delicate and refined. (Indeed one critic even calls it cheerful!)
By the way, there’s a lovely irony in the fact that St Pancras Old Church is actually younger than New St Pancras! The ‘new’ church on Euston Road, a splendid classical building, was erected in 1818-22. But the Old church, in this cemetery, was refurbished – in fact almost totally rebuilt – in 1848.
Photo credit: Matt Brown on flickr
Comments Off