Chapter Sixteen
King’s Cross St Pancras
The King Who Lasted Nine Years and the Saint Who Lasted Seventeen Centuries
Why is King’s Cross St Pancras called King’s Cross St Pancras?
In brief: The interchange joins two neighbouring names: King’s Cross, from a short-lived monument to George IV, and St Pancras, from the ancient parish dedicated to the Christian martyr Pancratius.
Transport context: London Underground and National Rail interchange.
In 1845, workmen remove the King’s Cross from King’s Cross.
The statue has already gone. George IV, carved above a busy junction on the New Road, was taken down three years earlier. What remains is the octagonal building beneath him, a monument that has tried several occupations since royal grandeur failed. Its base has served as a police station and a public house. Advertising has covered parts of it. Traffic passes on four sides and London has learned to use the structure chiefly as a landmark.1
Now the landmark is being demolished.
The king had been dead only six years when the monument was completed in 1836. The building raised in his honour will not survive another decade. Its materials can be removed; its name cannot.
People have already begun calling the junction King’s Cross.
This is the first of two disproportions contained in the station name. The cross was brief and the king unpopular, yet together they identify one of the busiest places in Britain. Beside them, the name St Pancras reaches back to a Roman boy executed seventeen centuries ago and to a parish whose precise beginning cannot be recovered.
A failed monument and an ancient dedication meet underground.
Before George IV, the junction was generally known as Battle Bridge. The old name has encouraged a more heroic origin story. Boudica, queen of the Iceni, is said to have fought her final battle against Rome here, perhaps even to lie buried beneath the railway platforms. No contemporary evidence places the battle at King’s Cross, and the location of Boudica’s defeat remains unknown. The story gives the district an antiquity it does not need and an archaeological certainty it does not possess.2
The ground has enough history without recruiting a queen.
The New Road, opened in the eighteenth century, runs east to west along what will become Euston Road. Gray’s Inn Road comes north from the older city. Maiden Lane and the road towards Pentonville carry traffic in other directions. The crossroads is untidy, exposed and useful. It lies beyond the fashionable centre but close enough to become part of London’s expansion.
George IV’s monument is placed where movement can advertise it.
The king had not been easy to commemorate. His private life, expenditure and treatment of Queen Caroline had made him a subject of ridicule and hostility. The structure at Battle Bridge does not reverse that reputation. Contemporary opinion frequently finds it ugly. The statue is badly received, the building beneath it put to practical uses, and the whole composition dismantled in 1845.1
Yet a name does not require affection.
It requires repetition.
Drivers use King’s Cross because the king can be seen above the road. Shopkeepers print the words because customers understand them. Newspapers use them because an address must be shorter than an explanation. By the time the monument disappears, language has completed the work that architecture could not.
The king leaves no palace here, no battlefield and no dynasty of buildings.
He leaves directions.
A few minutes’ walk to the north-east stands the older name.
St Pancras Old Church occupies rising ground beside the River Fleet, though the river now runs underground. The setting was once rural. Fields opened around the church; the Fleet crossed low ground nearby; the parish stretched north towards Highgate and south towards the edge of London. The building visible today contains medieval fabric but has been repeatedly restored, especially in 1847, 1888 and 1925. Claims that Christian worship began on the site in the fourth century belong to a long tradition rather than secure proof. The exact origin of the church remains uncertain.3
Its dedication is clearer.
Pancratius was a young Christian traditionally said to have been martyred in Rome around 304 during the persecution associated with the emperor Diocletian. Later accounts make him fourteen years old. His cult spread across western Europe, and churches bearing his name appeared in England. At this site, the saint’s name eventually belonged not only to a church but to one of London’s largest ancient parishes.4
The name is altered by English speech. Pancratius becomes Pancras. The martyr loses syllables and gains acreage.
For centuries St Pancras describes fields, lanes, scattered settlements, burial ground and parish administration rather than a railway terminus. Its old church stands apart from the densest population. That isolation helps make the churchyard attractive for burial. By the nineteenth century it contains generations of Londoners, including Roman Catholics and French émigrés. Records indicate 88,000 burials between 1689 and 1854, more than 32,000 of them in the final twenty-three years.5
The dead are numerous because London is numerous.
Then the railways arrive and require the same ground.
King’s Cross comes first. The Great Northern Railway reaches London in 1850, using a temporary terminus at Maiden Lane while its permanent station is built. The chosen site has already contained a smallpox and fever hospital. London repeatedly clears one form of necessity to make room for another.
On 14 October 1852, King’s Cross station opens to passengers.6
Lewis Cubitt’s design is almost severe. Two great arched windows reveal the train sheds behind a plain brick screen. A square clock tower supplies the principal ornament. Inside, one platform is intended for departure and another for arrival, with locomotive and carriage roads between them. The building does not attempt the romance later associated with railway travel. It announces capacity, order and engineering.
The short-lived monument has acquired a permanent terminus.
Eleven years later, the first Underground railway includes King’s Cross among its original stations. On 10 January 1863, steam trains begin running between Paddington and Farringdon. The line is built beneath streets because the streets above can no longer accept every traveller, cab, omnibus and cart trying to cross London.7
The Underground gives the local name another system in which to survive.
But the station now called King’s Cross St Pancras is not satisfied with one history.
The Midland Railway wants its own route into London. Until then it has depended upon agreements with the Great Northern to reach the capital. Dependence costs money and prestige. The company chooses land beside its rival and plans a terminus grand enough to make comparison unavoidable.
The route approaches across the Regent’s Canal. To pass over the water, the new platforms must be raised. William Henry Barlow turns the engineering constraint into architecture. His single-span iron-and-glass train shed rises 110 feet at its apex and extends 243 feet across. Beneath the elevated platforms, 850 cast-iron pillars create an undercroft for goods. The spacing accommodates barrels of beer from Burton upon Trent, among the Midland Railway’s most profitable cargoes.8
A station named for a saint will stand on columns measured for beer.
Before it can open, the railway must cross the churchyard.
The Young Architect Among the Graves
In 1865 Thomas Hardy is twenty-five years old and employed in the office of the architect Arthur Blomfield.
He is not yet known as a novelist. Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d’Urbervilles lie ahead. His profession is architecture, and one of its assignments has brought him to St Pancras.
The Midland Railway’s cutting takes part of the burial ground. The work is controversial. Graves are opened at night behind screens. Remains must be identified where possible, recorded and reinterred. Headstones are moved. Protests accompany a process in which the dead, once settled outside London, become an obstruction to the city that has reached them.9
Hardy serves as an overseer for Blomfield during the disinterments.
Later tradition gives him a more picturesque task: arranging headstones in a circle around the ash that became known as the Hardy Tree. The association between Hardy and the clearance is documented; the claim that he personally made the famous arrangement is less secure. The story has attached the novelist to the stones as firmly as the roots once did.10
There is no need to improve the assignment.
A young man employed to supervise the disturbance of crowded graves already stands at the meeting point of modern engineering and human remains. Railway plans reduce the churchyard to levels, property lines and a route. The ground answers with coffins, names and bodies.
Hardy will later write The Levelled Churchyard, a poem in which the displaced dead speak with bitter comedy about being mixed together. The work does not function as a report, but it preserves the moral grotesqueness of the clearance: identity confused by the machinery of improvement.9
The railway proceeds.
The grander tombs include that of the architect Sir John Soane and survive. Other monuments are moved. Headstones are grouped against walls and in mounds. When the remaining ground becomes a public garden, the Burdett-Coutts memorial is raised to commemorate those whose graves were disturbed. It is an elaborate act of remembrance built after an elaborate act of removal.9
The station opens in 1868 beneath Barlow’s great roof.
Its hotel frontage, designed by George Gilbert Scott, takes longer. Red brick, coloured stone, towers, pointed arches and Gothic detail rise along Euston Road until the Midland Grand Hotel resembles a palace from a northern European city enlarged by commercial confidence. It is not modest because its purpose is comparison. Beside Cubitt’s restrained King’s Cross, St Pancras turns railway competition into skyline.8
The two stations express different ambitions.
King’s Cross is a machine behind a wall.
St Pancras is a machine behind a performance.
Both consume land, direct movement and reshape the district. Coal, beer, meat, passengers and parcels arrive. Hotels, warehouses, goods yards and lodging houses gather around them. The old crossroads becomes a national threshold. A name once used to find a doubtful royal monument now appears on tickets to Scotland and the north-east. A saint invoked beside the Fleet now departs for the Midlands.
Below ground, railway companies add separate platforms and passages. Piccadilly line trains arrive in 1906; the line now forming part of the Northern follows in 1907; the Victoria line reaches the interchange in 1968. Names and systems accumulate until the Underground station serves six lines and two main-line termini.11
The combined name performs practical work. It tells passengers that the stations are separate above ground but connected below. It also preserves an unlikely pair.
George IV and Pancratius have almost nothing in common.
One is a nineteenth-century British monarch whose memorial was mocked and demolished. The other is a late Roman martyr whose biography survives chiefly through religious tradition. One name was fixed to a junction by nine unsuccessful years of architecture. The other travelled through worship, parish government and centuries of local speech.
The Underground places them on one line of type.
King’s Cross St Pancras.
The arrangement can make St Pancras seem like a second king or King’s Cross like a saint’s title. Passengers say the whole name quickly, reducing two histories to a destination. That compression is not an insult. It is how place names work. They carry more than conversation can unpack.
Leave the Underground and go first into King’s Cross station.
Cubitt’s brick façade is visible again after the removal of the twentieth-century concourse that once obscured it. The two arched windows remain, large enough to make the station’s original logic legible. Outside is a square where the monument to George IV does not stand.
Nothing marks the precise loss with comparable authority.
That is the success of the name. King’s Cross no longer requires a cross.
Then cross towards St Pancras. Scott’s hotel frontage rises above Euston Road, and Barlow’s roof contains trains bound beneath the Channel and across Britain. The undercroft intended for beer barrels now receives travellers, shops and international departures.
Continue north along Pancras Road to the old church.
The scale collapses. The great termini remain close, but the church and garden belong to an older geography. The Burdett-Coutts memorial stands among surviving tombs and relocated stones. Beneath and around the railways lie burials that could not all be preserved, identified or moved with dignity.
Here the two station names separate again.
The king belongs to a vanished object at a road junction.
The saint belongs to a church, a parish and a burial ground repeatedly altered but never wholly displaced.
George IV’s monument lasted nine years. The boy Pancras has been dead for approximately seventeen centuries.
The shorter memory named the crossroads.
The longer one named the ground.
Below Euston Road, the train doors open for both.
Notes and Sources
London Museum, “King’s Cross”, and Network Rail, “The history of London King’s Cross station”. The monument to George IV stood at the former Battle Bridge crossroads. It was completed in 1836; the statue was removed in 1842 and the building demolished in 1845. Its base served as a police station and later a public house.↩ ↩
The association of Battle Bridge with Boudica’s final battle is a later local tradition, not an archaeologically or textually established location. Camden Council, “Camden’s history”, treats Battle Bridge as the area’s earlier name but does not establish the Boudican identification. The chapter therefore does not present that story as fact.↩
Camden Council, “Camden’s history”, and St Pancras Old Church, “Churchyard History”. The precise foundation date of the church is uncertain. The present building was substantially altered in restorations of 1847, 1888 and 1925, while retaining older fabric and its historic site beside the River Fleet.↩
St Pancras Old Church, “Churchyard History”, and Camden Council, “Camden’s history”. Pancratius is traditionally described as a fourteen-year-old Christian martyred in Rome in 303 or 304. Details of his life derive from later tradition; the dedication of the London church and parish preserves his cult rather than a local event in his life.↩
St Pancras Old Church, “Churchyard History”. Parish records indicate about 88,000 burials between 1689 and 1854, including more than 32,000 during the final twenty-three years.↩
Network Rail, “The history of London King’s Cross station”. The Great Northern Railway used a temporary terminus at Maiden Lane from 1850. Lewis Cubitt’s permanent station opened on 14 October 1852 on a site formerly occupied by a smallpox and fever hospital.↩
London Transport Museum, “The Metropolitan line”. The Metropolitan Railway opened between Paddington and Farringdon on 10 January 1863, with King’s Cross among its original stations.↩
Network Rail, “The history of London St Pancras International station”. William Henry Barlow designed the iron-and-glass train shed, 243 feet wide and 110 feet high at its apex. The elevated station stood on 850 cast-iron pillars; their spacing accommodated Burton beer barrels. George Gilbert Scott designed the hotel frontage.↩ ↩
Historic England, “Burdett-Coutts Memorial Sundial”. A railway cutting formed in 1865 partially destroyed the burial ground. Graves were opened at night behind screens amid protest; Thomas Hardy, then an architect’s assistant, oversaw part of the process. The memorial later commemorated graves disturbed by the railway.↩ ↩ ↩
St Pancras Old Church, “Churchyard History”, and Historic England, “Burdett-Coutts Memorial Sundial”, document Hardy’s employment as an overseer during the disinterments. The popular claim that he personally arranged the headstones around the so-called Hardy Tree is not established by those records and is treated cautiously here.↩
London Transport Museum, “The Metropolitan line”, and Transport for London, “King’s Cross St Pancras Underground Station”. The interchange grew from the Metropolitan Railway station of 1863 to include the present Piccadilly, Northern and Victoria line platforms.↩