St Pancras (district)

:This article is about the place in London. For the saint, see Saint Pancras. For other things named after him, see St. Pancras.

Related Topics:
Saint Pancras - St. Pancras

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St Pancras is the name of a place in London. However, it is no longer very much used as a name for the district, having been largely superseded by several other terms for overlapping places.

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St Pancras was originally a medieval parish which ran from close to what is now Oxford Street north almost as far as Highgate, and from what is now Regent's Park in the west to the road now known as York Way in the east, boundaries which take in much of the current London Borough of Camden, including the central part of it. However, as the choice of name for the borough suggests, St Pancras has lost its status at the central settlement in the area. The district now encompassed by the term "St Pancras" is not easy to define, and usage of St Pancras as a place name is fairly limited.

Related Topics:
Parish - Oxford Street - Highgate - Regent's Park - York Way - London Borough of Camden

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The original focus of St Pancras was St Pancras Old Church, which is in the southern half of the parish, and is believed to be one of the oldest sites of Christianity in Great Britain. However in the 14th century the population abandoned the site and moved to Kentish Town. The reasons for this were probably the propensity 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. The old settlement was abandoned and the church fell into disrepair.

Related Topics:
St Pancras Old Church - Christianity - Great Britain - Kentish Town - River Fleet

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In the 1790s Earl Camden began to develop some fields to the north and west of the Old Church as Camden Town, which has become a better known place name than St Pancras. In the mid 19th century two major railway stations were built to the south of the Old Church, one of them called St Pancras and the other King's Cross. A residential district was built to the south and east of the church, but it is usually known as of Somers Town. The term St Pancras is sometimes applied to the immediate vicinity of St Pancras Station, but King's Cross is the usual name for the area around the two mainline stations as a whole.

Related Topics:
Earl Camden - Camden Town - St Pancras - King's Cross - Somers Town

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