Somers Town, Middlesex
| Somers Town | |
| Middlesex | |
|---|---|
 Eversholt Street, Somers Town | |
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | TQ295825 |
| Location: | 51°31’52"N, 0°7’53"W |
| Data | |
| Post town: | London |
| Postcode: | NW1 |
| Dialling code: | 020 |
| Local Government | |
| Council: | Camden |
| Parliamentary constituency: |
Holborn and St Pancras |
Somers Town is an inner-city urban village of Middlesex, developed from the late 18th century to the north of Westminster and now squashed between railway lines and their main stations, so that it has been strongly influenced by the three mainline north London railway termini: Euston (1838),St Pancras (1868) and King's Cross (1852), together with the Midland Railway Somers Town Goods Depot (1887) next to St Pancras, where the British Library now stands.
This area was named after Charles Cocks, 1st Baron Somers (1725–1806).[1][2] The area was originally granted by King William III to John Somers (1651–1716), Lord Chancellor and Baron Somers of Evesham.[3]
Historically, the name "Somers Town" was used for the larger triangular area between the Pancras, Hampstead, and Euston Roads,[1] but it is now taken to mean the rough rectangle centred on Chalton Street and bounded by Pancras Road, Euston Road, Eversholt Street, Crowndale Road, and the railway approaches to St Pancras station. Somers Town was originally within the mediæval Parish of St Pancras.[4]
History
600-1839
St Pancras Old Church is believed by many to be one of the oldest Christian sites in Britain. The churchyard remains consecrated but is managed as a park. It holds many literary associations, from Charles Dickens to Thomas Hardy, as well as memorials to dignitaries, including the remarkable tomb of architect Sir John Soane.
In the mid-1750s the New Road was established to bypass the congestion of London; Somers Town lay immediately north of this east–west toll road. In 1784, the first housing was built at the Polygon amid fields, brick works and market gardens on the northern fringes of London. Mary Wollstonecraft, writer, philosopher and feminist, lived there with her husband William Godwin, and died there in 1797 after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. The area appears to have appealed to middle-class people fleeing the French Revolution. The site of the Polygon is now occupied by a block of council flats called Oakshott Court, which features a commemorative plaque for Wollstonecraft.
St Mary's Church opened near the Polygon in 1827 and is now the parish church.[5] In 1830 the first on-duty fatality for the newly founded Metropolitan Police occurred when PC Joseph Grantham was kicked to death while trying to break up a street fight in Smiths Place, Somers Town.[6] The Polygon deteriorated socially as the surrounding land was subsequently sold off in smaller lots for cheaper housing, especially after the start of construction in the 1830s of the railway lines into Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross. In this period the area housed a large transient population of labourers and the population density of the area soared.
1840-1899
When St Luke's Church, near King's Cross, was demolished to make way for the construction of the Midland Railway's St Pancras station and its Midland Grand Hotel, the estimated 12,000 inhabitants of Somers Town at that time were deprived of that place of worship, as the church building was re-erected in Kentish Town, though St Mary's remained and St Matthew's Oakley Square was added in 1856.[7] In 1868 the lace merchant and philanthropist George Moore funded a new church, known as Christ Church and an associated school in Chalton Street with an entrance in Ossulston Street. The school accommodated about 600 children. Christ Church and the adjacent school were destroyed in a Second World War bombing raid and no trace remains today, the site being occupied by a children's play area and sports court, with its parish transferred to Old Saint Pancras Church. By the late 19th century most of the houses in the Polygon were in multiple occupation, and overcrowding was severe with whole families sometimes living in one room, as confirmed by the social surveys of Charles Booth and Irene Barclay.
An infirmary was added to the St Pancras Workhouse, adjacent to St Pancras Old Church in 1848, later becoming the St Pancras Hospital, the only hospital in the area not to have closed since 1980. Its current site includes buildings previously used by the Workhouse. St Mary's Dispensary (later the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital) opened at 144 Euston Road in 1866, followed by the National Temperance Hospital at 110-112 Hampstead Road in 1873.
Dickens
Charles Dickens lived in the Polygon briefly as a child and knew the area well. The Polygon, where he once lived, appears in Chapter 52 of The Pickwick Papers (1836), when Mr Pickwick's solicitor's clerk, arriving at Gray's Inn just before ten o'clock, says he heard the clocks strike half past nine as he walked through Somers Town: "It went the half hour as I came through The Polygon." The building makes its appearance again in Bleak House (1852), when it served as the home of Harold Skimpole.[8] In David Copperfield (1850), Johnson (now Cranleigh) Street was the thoroughfare near the Royal Veterinary College, Camden Town, where the Micawbers lived, when Traddles, David Copperfield's friend and schoolfellow, was their lodger.[9]
In A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Roger Cly, the Old Bailey informant, was buried in Old St Pancras Churchyard. The funeral over, later that night Jerry Cruncher and his companions went "fishing" (body snatching), trying unsuccessfully to 'resurrect' Cly.[10] Robert Blincoe (1792–1860), on whose life story Oliver Twist (1838) may be based, was a child inmate at the St Pancras Workhouse. A central character in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1865) is Nicodemus Boffin, nicknamed 'The Golden Dustman' because of the wealth he inherited from his old employer John Harmon, who had made his fortune as a dust contractor at Somers Town.[11]
1900-1979
Improvement of the slum housing conditions, amongst the worst in the capital, was first undertaken by St Pancras Borough Council in 1906 at Goldington Buildings, at the junction of Pancras Road and Royal College Street, and continued on a larger scale by the St Pancras House Improvement Society, established in 1924. The Society's Sidney Street and Drummond Street estates incorporated sculpture panels of Doultonware designed by Gilbert Bayes and ornamental finials for the washing line posts designed by the same artist: these are now mostly destroyed or replaced with replicas.[12]
The Ossulston Estate was built as new social housing in 1927. There remain a few older Grade II listed properties, mostly Georgian terraced houses.
1979-present
In the 1980s, some council tenants took advantage of the 'right to buy' scheme and bought their homes at a substantial discount. Later they moved away from the area. The consequence was an influx of young semi-professional people, resulting in a changing population. Somers Town experienced ethnic tension between whites and Bengalis in the early 1990s, climaxing in the murder of Richard Everitt in 1994.[13][14] Major construction work along the eastern side of Somers Town was completed in 2008, to allow for the Eurostar trains to arrive at the refurbished St Pancras station. This involved the excavation of part of the St Pancras Old Churchyard, the human remains being re-interred at St Pancras and Islington Cemetery in East Finchley.[15]
Land at Brill Place, previously earmarked for later phases of the British Library development, became available when the library expansion was cancelled and was used as site offices for the High Speed 1 terminal development and partly to allow for excavation of a tunnel for the new Thameslink station. It was then acquired as the site for the Francis Crick Institute, a major medical research institute established by a partnership of charity and academic institutions.
Arts and culture
Somers Town has a flourishing street market, held in Chalton Street, Wednesday to Friday.[16] The START (Somers Town Art) Festival of Cultures is held on the second Saturday in July, on the site of the market.
Outside links
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("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Somers Town, Middlesex) |
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Walford, Edward (1878). "Somers Town and Euston Square". Old and New London: A Narrative of Its History, Its People, and Its Places. Illustrated with Numerous Engravings from the Most Authentic Sources. 5. London: Cassell Petter & Galpin. pp. 340–355. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45241. Retrieved 2011-06-26.
- ↑ Malcolm, J.P. (1813). "Origin and gradual increase of Somers Town". The Gentleman's Magazine 83 (November, 1813): 427–429.
- ↑ Somers Cocks, J.V. (1967). A History of the Cocks Family. Ashhurst, New Zealand: J. Somers Cocks. ISBN 0-473-06085-X. http://homepages.xnet.co.nz/~sremos/history.pdf. Retrieved 2011-06-27.
- ↑ Palmer, Samuel (1870). St. Pancras; being antiquarian, topographical, and biographical memoranda, relating to the extensive metropolitan parish of St. Pancras, Middlesex; with some account of the parish from its foundation. London: Field & Tuer. https://archive.org/stream/stpancrasbeingan00palmrich/stpancrasbeingan00palmrich_djvu.txt. Retrieved 21 March 2019.
- ↑ Miller, Frederick (1874). Saint Pancras, Past and Present: Being Historical, Traditional and General Notes of the Parish. London: Abel Heywood & Son. p. 331. https://archive.org/details/saintpancraspas00millgoog. Retrieved 2013-05-26.
- ↑ Aston, Mark (2005). Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Hampstead, Holborn & St Pancras. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Wharncliffe. ISBN 9781783408283. https://books.google.com/books?id=D8SIDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT94. Retrieved 7 March 2019.
- ↑ "Saint Matthew, Saint Pancras: Oakley Square, Camden". https://search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/LMA_OPAC/web_detail?SESSIONSEARCH&exp=refd%20P90/MTW.
- ↑ Wright, Thomas (1935). The life of Charles Dickens. London: Herbert Jenkins Limited. pp. 50. https://books.google.com/books?id=fnwdAAAAMAAJ. Retrieved 2 June 2013.
- ↑ Wright, Thomas (1935). The life of Charles Dickens. London: Herbert Jenkins Limited. pp. 44. https://books.google.com/books?id=fnwdAAAAMAAJ. Retrieved 2 June 2013.
- ↑ Wright, Thomas (1935). The life of Charles Dickens. London: Herbert Jenkins Limited. pp. 52. https://books.google.com/books?id=fnwdAAAAMAAJ. Retrieved 2 June 2013.
- ↑ "The Golden Dustmen of Dickens' time". 10 February 2016. http://jot101.com/2016/02/the-golden-dustmen-of-dickens-time/.
- ↑ Roland Jeffery, Housing Happenings in Somers Town in Housing the Twentieth Century Nation, Twentieth Century Architecture No 9, 2008, ISBN 978-0-9556687-0-8
- ↑ Braid, Mary (16 August 1994). "Fear and loathing after 'racial' murder: Gangs of teenagers have vowed to avenge the death of a white schoolboy stabbed by a group of Asians in Somers Town, north London, on Saturday". The Independent (London). https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/fear-and-loathing-after-racial-murder-gangs-of-teenagers-have-vowed-to-avenge-the-death-of-a-white-1383793.html.
- ↑ McKie, John (1 November 1995). "Gang leader gets life for killing boy". The Independent (London). https://www.independent.co.uk/news/gang-leader-gets-life-for-killing-boy-1536715.html.
- ↑ Phil Emery; Pat Miller (2010). "Archaeological findings at the site of the St Pancras Burial Ground and its vicinity". London Archaeologist (Winter 2010/2011): 296.
- ↑ "Markets in Camden". Camden London Borough Council. https://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/content/leisure/around-camden/things-to-do/markets-in-camden/?context=live.