04/10/2026
Welly, welly, well, well, well..... after a social media hiatus, I decided to let you back into my world and already the post about Dude's Instagram page has more than double interest in views and likes than anything I've posted about me...... thanks for boosting my confidence.
Anyhow here goes.
I already posted about my first day of my London visit this week so here's what I did the following day, which may be of interest to some of you.
I woke to the sounds of the city in a dodgy air bnb in Camden on the Tuesday morning after seeing the band the night before..... I knew I was walking distance from Saint Pancras Station, so off I set around 8.30, not to the station but the St Pancreas Old Church, which has been on my must visit list for sometime.
St Pancras Old Church is known as one of the oldest places in the UK for Christian worship, and it seems no one is willing to put a date on the actual building as some of it may date back to the 4th century, quite a bit of it is medieval, then it was refurbed in the 17th and also the 19th century..... it's old ......OK.
The reason I wanted to visit, was to see the Hardy Tree, which sadly died and fell in 2022 , but another has been planted but I don't know what the plan is.
The original tree was said to have been planted some time around 1860. Shortly afterwards, Thomas Hardy( the author), for whom the tree is named, was involved in the exhumation of graves during his time studying as an architect to make way for the Midland Railway to run through the churchyard. The human remains were buried some where else, but the gravestones of those resumed were stacked and embedded around the base of the Ash tree as a memorial.
This is where it get really cool, one of the gravestones around the Hardy tree is that of John William Polidori, who wrote 'The Vampyre', the first published modern vampire story, which was inspired and accredited to and by Lord Byron, and Polidori is credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction.......if you didn't know Bauhaus, Bella Lugois is Dead.....is my world.
Byron had come up with the idea in a competition with friends who could make the scariest story up, one friend being Mary Shelly who went on to use her idea to write. Frankenstein.
Another grave/tomb in the St Pancras Old Churchyard is that of Mary Wollstonecraft who was 18th century radical thinker, philosopher and she was the author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, published 1792...... a proper feminism.......who guess what? she was the mother of Mary Shelly..... to much history in one place, I'll take me pills.... the church is also known due to a 4 beat combo band from Liverpool who had a photo shoot there in the 60's ......sorry I had to do the photo of me standing where Johm Lennon stood...... Also as I walked to Euston to get the 12.40 train up north I had breakie, popped in to a art gallery, a really cool book shop, bought some cool books and.......sod it ..... its rude not to go and read my Freedom of rights, Magna Carta in the British Library.... also saw some Beatles lyrics....and da vinci
