The Hardy Tree

I previously blipped St Pancras Old Church on 12th April and recently found out some facts about the chuchyard that I thought worthy of sharing.

This is known as The Hardy Tree and from a plaque on the fence it says the following:
The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is best known for his novels set in rural 'Wessex', however before turning to writing full time he studied architecture in London from 1862-67 under Mr Arthur Blomfield, an architect based in Covent Garden.

During the 1860s the Midland Railway Line was being built over part of the original St Pancras Churchyard. Blomfield was commissioned by the Bishop of London to supervise the proper exhumation of human remains and dismantling of tombs. He passed this unenviable task onto his protégé Thomas Hardy in c.1865.

Hardy would have spent many hours in St Pancras Old Churchyard during the construction of the railway, overseeing the careful removal of bodies and tombs from the land on which the railway was being built. The headstones around this ash tree would have been placed here around this time. Note how the tree has since grown in amongst the stones.


A few years before Hardy's involvement here, Charles Dickens makes reference to Old St Pancras Churchyard in his Tale of Two Cities (1859), as the churchyard in which Roger Cly was buried and where Jerry Cruncher was known to 'fish' (a 19th Century term for tomb robbery and body snatching).