Old St Pancras is one of those curious London churches, like St Sepulchre’s, that belongs to all periods of history, though the outside appearance today is Gothic Revival. It is very, very old; there is some evidence that it goes back to Roman times. The church stands on what used to be a hillock overlooking the River Fleet, and the site is thought to have once been a pagan shrine. Today, however, the old church grounds lie between busy Pancras Road and the railroad right of way.
The reason that St Pancras Old Church belongs to all periods is that it was never completely destroyed and rebuilt. Thus one can find Norman work (north wall and north and south doors), Early English (part of a lancet window), thirteenth and fifteenth-century objects (piscina, or a shallow stone basin in the wall; sedile, or a recessed stone seat), a gallery with eighteenth-century scroll work, and the nineteenth-century tower and walls already mentioned. The oldest object in the church is an altar-stone found under the tower during the partial rebuilding in 1847–48. Five crosses cut into it lead historians to believe it dates from the sixth century!
In very early times this was the village church of St Pancras. The city was then quite a distance away to the southeast. By the eighteenth century the area had become a kind of desolate wilderness on the edge of the growing metropolis. An observer of 1777 describes it as ‘a rural place, in some parts entirely covered with docks and nettles, enclosed only by a low hand-rail, and commanding extensive views of open country in every direction’. The new St Pancras was built in 1822, and the old church became a chapel of ease to it. It was restored in the Norman style in 1847–48 and again made a parish church in 1863. Old St Pancras still retains a kind of rural aspect. Like a village church it is surrounded by an ancient churchyard, now a public garden. A great many illustrious persons are buried here and not a few notorious ones. The most prominent monument is that which was provided by Sir John Soane, founder of the Soane Museum, for his wife. The interior of Old St Pancras, also not unlike a country parish church, possesses a number of monuments from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.