Mick Hartley

On my way back from the British Library (to see this) I stopped off at the St Pancras Old Churchyard at the back of Kings Cross. It's one of those typically London out-of-the-way places that you have to make a special effort to find. Atmospheric, certainly, but not so much because of its historical associations – it's reputed to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England – but because of the looming Victorian buildings of St Pancras Hospital off to the side:

In a former life it was the St Pancras Workhouse - and that's what it still looks like, with all the Dickensian associations:

Now it specialises, appropriately enough, in geriatric and psychiatric medicine.

Elsewhere, there's Sir John Soane's mausoleum, the inspiration for Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's design for the old red telephone boxes:

And the Hardy tree:

 
In the 1860s the young Thomas Hardy, then working for a London architect, was in charge of clearing the old graveyard in readiness for the new railway lines steaming out of St Pancras, and here's where he dumped the headstones.

Also, a lovely blue drinking fountain from 1877:

Which you can see in one of the photos from this odd collection: the Beatles in 1968 as part of their Mad Day Out photo session. Though the hollyhocks are long gone.