St Pancras Old Church

St Pancras Old Church is a Church of England parish church on Pancras Road, Somers Town, in the London Borough of Camden. Somers Town is an area of the ancient parish and later Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras.

Dedicated to the Roman martyr Saint Pancras, the patron saint of children, it is reputed to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England, although this is not supported by strong evidence. St Pancras Old Church, which was largely rebuilt in the Victorian era, should not be confused with St Pancras New Church (1819–1822) about 860 metres (940 yd) away on Euston Road.

The building served the large ancient parish of St Pancras, which stretched from a point a short distance north of Oxford Street, northward to Highgate.

By the 18th century there seems to have been a local belief that St Pancras was of very great age. By some traditions, the church has been a site of Christian worship since AD 314 in the Roman era, or since the early Anglo-Saxon period, traditions which would make the church one of the very oldest in England. However as with most parish churches, especially the older ones, there is little documentary or archaeological evidence to allow the first use of the site to be dated. Remnants of medieval features in the building and references in the Domesday Book suggest the site was in use during the Anglo-Saxon period.

As early as 1593 the cartographer John Norden had commented in his Speculum Britanniae that the dilapidated St Pancras church looked older than St Paul's Cathedral.

Information panels outside the church today state that it "stands on one of Europe’s most ancient sites of Christian worship, possibly dating back to the early 4th century" and has been a "site of prayer and meditation since 314 AD". A vicar of the church claimed (at some point prior to 1870) to have seen a document in the Vatican Library that placed the foundation to the 4th century, during the Roman period.

The case for a Roman period establishment was argued by local historian Charles Lee in 1955, who wrote:

There can be little doubt that a Roman encampment was situated opposite the site of St Pancras Church about this period, and that the church is on the site of a Roman Compitum, which served as a centre of public worship and public meeting... It seems probable that the Roman Compitum at St Pancras was adapted to Christian worship shortly after the restoration of religious freedom in 313 (taking its name from the recently-martyred Pancras).