St Pancras Old Church is a Church of England parish church on Pancras Road, Somers Town, in the London Borough of Camden. Somers Town is an area of the ancient parish and later Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras.
Dedicated to the Roman martyr Saint Pancras, the patron saint of children, it is reputed to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England, although this is not supported by strong evidence. St Pancras Old Church, which was largely rebuilt in the Victorian era, should not be confused with St Pancras New Church (1819–1822) about away on Euston Road.
History The building served the large ancient parish of St Pancras, which stretched from a point a short distance north of Oxford Street, northward to Highgate.
Origins By the 18th century there seems to have been a local belief that St Pancras was of very great age. By some traditions, the church has been a site of Christian worship since AD 314 in the Roman era, or since the early Anglo-Saxon period, traditions which would make the church the oldest in north London, and one of the very oldest in England. However as with most parish churches, especially the older ones, there is little documentary or archaeological evidence to allow the first use of the site to be dated. Remnants of medieval features in the building and references in the Domesday Book suggest the site was in use during the Anglo-Saxon period.
As early as 1593 the cartographer John Norden had commented in his Speculum Britanniae that the dilapidated St Pancras church looked older than St Paul's Cathedral.
Roman tradition Information panels outside the church today state that it "stands on one of Europe’s most ancient sites of Christian worship, possibly dating back to the early 4th century" and has been a "site of prayer and meditation since 314 AD". A vicar of the church claimed (at some point prior to 1870) to have seen a document in the Vatican Library that placed the foundation to the 4th century, during the Roman period.
The case for a Roman period establishment was argued by local historian Charles Lee in 1955, who wrote:
There can be little doubt that a Roman encampment was situated opposite the site of St Pancras Church about this period, and that the church is on the site of a Roman Compitum, which served as a centre of public worship and public meeting... It seems probable that the Roman Compitum at St Pancras was adapted to Christian worship shortly after the restoration of religious freedom in 313 (taking its name from the recently-martyred Pancras). Lee's "Roman encampment" was "Caesar’s Camp at Pancras called the Brill", identified by the antiquary William Stukeley in the 1750s.Stukeley's original plan of Caesar's Camp in the British Library However, some at least of Stukeley's contemporaries could see no trace of this camp, and considered that Stukeley had let his imagination run away with him.
The place name 'The Brill' was recorded as 'The Bruel' in 1741-5 and 'The Bruil' in 1788. This may derive from the word 'bruil' or 'broil', a forest term denoting a park or woodstocked with beasts of the chase.The place-names of Middlesex, 1942, J.E.B. Gover and Allen Mawer. English Place Name Society. Page 141
Gillian Tindall has suggested that the minor earthworks in the fields to the west of the church that Stukeley interpreted as a Roman camp were actually traces of the original medieval village of St Pancras, before the centre of the settlement moved north to the area now known as Kentish Town.
Lee's use of the word compitum, properly a Roman temple or shrine situated at a crossroads, indicates his indebtedness to the work of Montagu Sharpe (1856–1942), a Middlesex magistrate, former chairman of the Middlesex County Council and amateur historian and archaeologist. Sharpe had proposed, in a book first published in 1919, that the area of the county of Middlesex had in Roman times been subject to the form of land division known as centuriation, marked out by roads in a regular grid pattern covering the whole county. Sharpe noted, when plotting his gridlines, that a number of ancient parish churches appeared to be on or close to intersections, or at least on road alignments. He concluded that these churches must therefore stand on the sites of pagan compita, and represent the deliberate conversion of pagan temples to Christian use by early missionaries to the Middle Saxons in the 7th century. St Pancras Old Church is one of those marked on Sharpe's map.
Anglo-Saxon and Early Norman period In 597, Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine of Canterbury at the head of a group of 40 monks intending to promote the re-establishment of Christianity in England. Pope Gregory sent Augustine with relics of St Pancras, and the first church Augustine established, was dedicated to St Pancras and located in Canterbury, the capital of the Kingdom of Kent. Some traditions also ascribe the establishment of the St Pancras Old Church, or its dedication to St Pancras, with Augustine's mission and the relics he brought.
J. Carter Rendell (vicar 1912–26) argued that a medieval altar slab marked with five consecration crosses, found during the 19th-century building works, could be dated to the 6th century.
Phil Emery and Pat Miller discuss the archaeological history of the site in 'Archaeological findings at the site of the St Pancras Burial Ground and its vicinity': The 1847 reconstruction of the medieval church revealed Roman tiles in the fabric of its tower and an inscribed altar stone dated to AD 625 (other sources estimate an AD 600 dateLondon Encyclopaedia, Weinreb and Hibbert, 1983), which might suggest an early 7th-century foundation. The original cemetery around the church appears to have been sub-circular like many late Saxon cemeteries
These archaeological findings seem to go some way to countering the 18th century London historian William Maitland, who dismissed links to Augustine's era as a "vulgar Tradition", and suggested that there was confusion with the ancient church with the same dedication in the grounds of St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, which was said to have been converted from a pagan temple by Augustine in 598.
In 1870 local historian Samuel Palmer reported "This old and venerable church is said to be the first Christian place of worship in the county of Middlesex in the eighth or ninth century."
An earlier vicar is said to have claimed to have seen in the Vatican Library a manuscript mentioning that St Pancras church was built in the 9th century (in addition to the other clergyman who claimed to have found reference to a Roman era establishment).
The church is known to have been present in the 11th century, being one of very few mentioned in the Domesday Book.St Pancras Old Church website https://stpancrasoldchurch.posp.co.uk/history/church-history/
Medieval and Tudor church building
When the church was rebuilt in 1847, builders found some evidence of Anglo-Saxon period church activity and some re-used Roman tiles in the walls. They were able to identify that the church building they were replacing was mainly late Tudor with elements of earlier structures incorporated.
According to a Victorian architect, Robert Lewis Roumieu, involved in the works: The old church was principally late Tudor. When it was pulled down to be rebuilt, several small Norman columns, pilaster piers and other remains of a Norman edifice were found among the materials used in the wall, leaving no doubt but that the original church had been a Norman structure which had been at some time completely rebuilt and part used as building material in the reconstruction.
In the early Middle Ages there was a centre of population in the vicinity of what is now known as the old church. However, in the 14th century the focus of population is thought to have shifted to what is now Kentish Town (further north in St Pancras parish). The reasons for this were probably the vulnerability of the plain around the church to flooding (the River Fleet, which is now underground, runs through it) and the availability of better wells at Kentish Town, where there is less clay in the soil.
Disrepair and restoration After the Reformation the isolation and decay of the church made it a tempting resort for Catholics: indeed, it was said that the last bell which tolled for the Mass in England was at St Pancras. St Pancras (and to a lesser degree Paddington Church) were the only places in London where Roman Catholics were permitted to be buried. Among the several Catholics buried in the churchyard was Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. His name was misspelled in the burial register as John Cristian Back.
The church fell into disrepair and towards the end of the 18th century services were only held there on one Sunday each month; on other weeks, the same congregation would use a chapel in Kentish Town. 18th and early 19th century urban expansion led to the construction of the capacious St Pancras New Church on what was then the "New Road" (Euston Road, about a km away). The old building lost its status as the parish church when the New Church was consecrated in 1822, and became a chapel of ease. As it stood in the early 19th century, the church consisted of an unaisled nave, a chancel without a chancel arch and a western tower. The south porch had served as a vestry since the 18th century.
By 1847 the Old Church was derelict, but in view of the growth of population in the southern part of the parish, it was decided to restore it. (Victorian restoration of churches is not what we understand today by the phrase building restoration.) The architect of the alterations was Alexander Dick Gough.
The old tower was removed, allowing the nave to be extended westwards, and a new tower was built on the south side. The south porch was removed, and a new vestry was added on the north side. The whole exterior of the church was refaced or reworked. The enlargement and the addition of galleries increased the capacity of the church from about 120 to 500.
Services resumed, including funerals, baptisms and weddings, such as that, on July 25, 1852, of William Rose, of Fulletby, and Helen Tippetts, of Windsor, daughter of Obadiah Tippetts, silk merchant and draper of Cheapside, by Curate R. P. Wilkinson.Record does not clearly state whether the wedding took place in the old church or the new church. England Marriages, 1538–1973", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:NK5L-VXT : Wed Apr 16 13:46:04 UTC 2025), Entry for William Rose and Helen Tippetts, 25 Jul 1852. There were further restorations of the Old Church in 1888 by Arthur Blomfield with the reredos by C. E. Buckeridge; in 1925 when the plaster ceiling and the side galleries were removed, and in 1948 following Second World War bomb damage. The building was designated a grade II* listed building on 10 June 1954, That year also saw the former parish of Christ Church Somers Town (destroyed in the 1940 Blitz) merged into that of St Pancras Old Church, followed by that of St Matthew's Oakley Square in 1956.
Clergy The first recorded vicar was Fulcherius, who was appointed in 1181.St Pancras Old Church website https://stpancrasoldchurch.posp.co.uk/history/church-history/ Richard Granger is named as parson of the church of St Pancras, in 1446.appears as defendant in the 8th entry in http://aalt.law.uh.edu/AALT1/H6/CP40no740/bCP40no740dorses/IMG_1604.htm
Present organisation The church has a chaplaincy to the nearby St Pancras Hospital and from 2003 to 2023 it formed part of the Old St Pancras Parish (which also included St Michael's Church, Camden Town, St Mary's Church, Somers Town and St Paul's Church, Camden Square - all four are now independent parishes again).