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St Pancras
Grounds north of the Euston Rd
Key:  current observations and notes   Holmes (1897)     other sources     maps

There is a large memorial to the French émigrés mentioned by Holmes; presumably their remains were reburied underneath.  
Mentioned in A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens with reference to body snatching. 
   During the recent work on the railway extension the coffin of Arthur-Richard Dillon, Archbishop of Narbonne, was discovered. A somewhat colourful character, He took refuge in England when his Archbishopric was abolished in 1790, and died in 1806. The body was found complete with its Sèvres porcelain false teeth. The teeth are now on show in the Museum of London; Dillon himself was reburied in Narbonne Cathedral in 2006.  

There was a fracas here in June of 1821. A Mr Coleman was passing by with his servant when he was shot at from the ground around midnight; luckily for Mr Coleman, the shot narrowly missed. This was not the first time this had happened; a similar incident had occurred the previous Sunday morning.
  Sometime later an Irish bricklayer from Drury Lane was discovered in the ground armed with a pistol, a razor, an old sword concealed in an umbrella and two knives; he was, apparently,  well supplied with tobacco and porter. He claimed that he was there merely to defend the corpse of a recently deceased relative. The pistol did not appear to have been used recently, but the Irishman was detained pending further enquiries. (The Times, June 19th 1821)
  This report illustrates the point that Holmes makes; the ground was a popular burial place for Catholics, as its history stretched back before the reformation.  The ground is a long walk from Drury Lane. 
Burial place of Johann Christian Bach (d. 1782) John Soane, (d. 1837) , his wife, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mother of Mary Shelley (d.1797), later moved to Bournemouth.

These two grounds now form one garden, about 6 acres in extent, maintained with much care for the use of the public by St. Pancras Vestry .St. Giles' ground dates from 1803, but the other is much older. In 1889 part of St. Pancras ground was acquired under a special Act by the Midland Railway Company. This part was, in 1791, assigned to the French  émigrés, and many celebrated Frenchmen and Roman Catholics were buried there. Part of it has not actually been built upon, as the railway goes over it on arches. There are many high stacks of tombstones in the garden, and a "trophy" and a "dome" of headstones, numbering 496, which were taken from the part acquired by the railway.  (Holmes)

The appearance presented by the ground of Old St. Pancras's parish is very extraordinary. Unaided imagination would scarcely reach to it, and we have therefore pencilled down its general aspect. An account of the number of bodies here deposited would startle the most apathetic.
    St. Pancras' ground is truly a distressing sight. The stones - an assembly of reproachful spirits - are falling all ways; the outbuildings put up on its confines are rent, and the paved pathways are everywhere disrupted, such is the loose and quaking state of the whole mass. The practice of pit-burial is still continued in this ground. When we were there last, we found a hole with six coffins in it, waiting its complement of about double that number!
  (London Shadows, by George Godwin, 1854)

Of the difficulty experienced in carrying the railway through the graveyard of Old St. Pancras Church, and also through that of St. Giles's parish which adjoins it, without any unavoidable disturbance of the dead, we have spoken in a previous chapter; but we may add here, that, though every precaution was taken by the agents of the Midland Railway Company, a most serio-comic incident occurred during the process. The company had purchased a new piece of ground in which to re-inter the human remains discovered in the part which they required. Among them was the corpse of a high dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church in France. Orders were received for the transshipment of the remains to his native land, and the delicate work of exhuming the corpse was entrusted to some clever gravediggers. On opening the ground they were surprised to find the bones, not of one man, but of several. Three skulls and three sets of bones were yielded up by the soil in which they had lain mouldering. The difficulty was how to identify the bones of a French ecclesiastic amid so many. After much discussion, the shrewdest of the gravediggers suggested that, as he was a foreigner, the darkest-coloured skull must be his. Acting upon this idea, the blackest bones were sorted and put together, until the requisite number of lefts and rights were obtained. These were reverently screwed up in a new coffin, conveyed to France, and buried again with all the "pomp and circumstance" of the Roman Catholic Church.
    (Agar Town and the Midland Railway',   Old and New London: Volume 5 (1878) From British History on Line. )

Early print

The Dome

The new wall

Mid nineteenth Century view

The French Monument

The Soane Monument

Thanks to Sophie Marton for the lower three pictures

Camden Chapel

St Mary's Somers Town

Christchurch Albany St

To burial grounds south of the Euston Rd