flanneruk

"Who's St Pancras?" asks Merseyheart

Call yourself a Scouser and haven't got a copy of Pevsner's guide to the buildings of Liverpool? Bloody Hell!!! Have you really never seen Liverpool's most beautiful church?

The church of St Agnes and St Pancras in Ullet Rd, dating from an era Liverpool's Catholics were putting up ecclesiastical kitsch by the lorry load and its Presbyterians erecting joyless prayer shacks, is the great monument to the city's CofE minority: a truly glorious piece of late 19th century High Anglican beauty.

Something which St Pancras seems to have inspired in the churches dedicated to his memory. Held to have been a Diocletian-era Christian from Phrygia (central Turkey), he was claimed to have been martyred in Rome. Pope Gregory the Great gave St Augustine relics of St Pancras to take with him on his mission to "convert" the English.

Some of the relics appear to have been venerated in St Pancras Old Church, a stylish, originally 7th century (but crassly restored in the 19th century) church, held by some to have been founded a few hundred years even earlier, still alive and kicking about 200 yds NW of the station.

It was decommissioned around 1820 (though subsequently brought back into service), and replaced by St Pancras New Church on Euston Rd opposite Euston Station. Probably the finest church produced by England's Greek Revival.

The original St Pancras church, in Via San Pancrazio in Rome, is supposed to be pretty good too, and I'm planning to check that in the near future. For a martyr most of us have never heard of, he's spawned an awful lot of impressive buildings.

PatrickLondon

>>Cockfosters, anyone<<

As the old advert has it, serve it warm, mate.

Merseyheart

flanner, I bow once again to your knowledge of Merseyside.

So much England, not enough time.

Cholmondley_Warner

St Pancras (the london one) is the only church I can think of with katydids.

Now what about poor old Gillespie Road?

yk

Mile End - Is that at the end of a mile? Which mile?

Manor House - I presume some Lord from the middle ages had a manor house there? Which lord and does it still exist?

Pudding Mill Lane - A mill to make pudding???

Moorgate - A gate where the Moors came in?

Seven Sisters?

In any case, the names of the tube stations in London are far more interesting than any station names in the US.

I should go check out the London Transport Museum next time.

PalenQ

MILE END

'La Mile in 1288... hamalet so named because it one mile from Aldgate on the old Colchester Rd.

SEVEN SISTERS

has nothing to do with ladies but 'seven elm trees - originally called 7 Sesters.

GILLESPIE ROAD

the name of today's Arsenal station before it was changed to Arsenal "in 1932 at a pre-war height of the Club's fame" ("Arsenal Football Club moved here in 1913 from Woolwich where it had been founded at the Royal Arsenal Factory in 1884 - hence the nickname for the team: The Gunners" and forever has dominated its sad sack neighboring team, the Spurs of TOTTENHAM

The name Gillespie Road is still emblazoned in tiles i believe at today's station.

flanneruk

Moorgate is the gate leading to the moor outside the walls to the north of the city. Drained in the 16th century to produce the Moor Fields.

Being outside the City, the Moor Fields were a great place for a cemetery for dissenters, who couldn't be buried inn the CofE graveyards inside the walls. So Moorfields cemetery houses many of the great Dissenters of post-Reformation London, like Bunyan

PalenQ

Flannerpooch is of course 'Spot On'

and the book also says: "The moor itself was virtually uninhabited and unused thruout the Middle Ages except by crowds of ice skaters in winter. As the area was built up over the years, Thge Moorfields became London's first civic park and today places such as Finsbury Square and Finsbury Circus are part of the original Moor.

(wonder why Moor is capitalized?)

flanneruk

Manor House, the Harringey tube station, seems to have nothing to do with an actual manor house. There's a pub round the corner called The Manor House: the kind of name that's not rare among big late 19th/early 20th century pubs.

Somewhere there's probably a website about tube stations named after pubs

Pudding Mill. No idea about the pudding bit. But all along the Thames (which it is) there are places with the word 'mill' in - like Millbank.

Mostly this is because there are dozens of mini rivers - that flow into the Thames, though mostly they've now been covered over. In medieval times people had an extraordinary grasp of mill technology: streams we think of as titchy now are often known to have powered scores of mills for all sorts of purposes from grinding corn to running looms. A skill we lost with the discovery of cheap hydrocarbon energy.

flanneruk

"why Moor is capitalized?"

It always is. If a city gate is blue, it's called the Blue Gate, or Bluegate. If a field is forty acres it's Forty Acres Field. A flat field might morph over time to Flatfield - but the initial letter's always capitalised.

PalenQ

Luddite!

PUDDING MILL LANE

'very little is recorded on this place name, but we can presume that the meaning is similar to Pudding Lane in the City of London - buthcers had their scalding houses here as early as the 1100s and it's suggested that 'puddings' was the nickname for butchers offal. The Mill was once nearby.

<you got to eat your pudding.....you go to eat your pudding... Pinkie>

Cholmondley_Warner

The puddings in Pudding Lane were puddings like black pudding and tripe.

PalenQ

how about Shepherd's Bush, Earl's Court, and St. John's Wood?
Cockfosters

COCKFOSTERS - the name on the end of tube trains that never ceased to arouse nasty connotations in my mind

to paraphrase the book

'district here recorded as Cockfosters in 1524 - origin of name uncertain

possibly derived from either the personal name of a family that lived here, or a house recorded in 1613 called Cockfosters, residence of the chief forester (cock forester) - hence this unusual name was spelt as two words until the opening of the Tube Station in 1933.

derivation much less interesting than the name would have implied IMO

Cholmondley_Warner

If you like this sort of thing you might like a book by Neil Gaiman called Neverwhere which is a fantasy in which there really is an Angel in Islington, an Earl has a court in SW London, Shepherds look after their flock in W12 and so on.

yk

Hanger Lane - Where they hang people?

Bayswater?
MudChute?
Blackwall?

How about household names such as Paddington, Euston, Knightsbridge?

PalenQ

HANGER LANE - not so sensational but rather dull:

'named hanger Hill in 1710 - marking the site of a wood known as le Hangrewode in 1393 - from OE 'hangra' - 'a wooded hill'. Later changed to Lane.

BAYSWATER - a bit more interesting

'Bayard's Watering (perhaps from Bayard family and where Westbourne Stream crossed the present Bayswater Road) in 1380 morphed to Bay(e)swater -

BLACKWALL - 'Blackvale' in 1330s and at times called Bleak wall. perhaps from OE blaee and might refer to windy stretch of Thames

PatrickLondon

Mudchute (I know because I live there) - the local name given because when the Millwall Dock was dug out, a mechanical conveyor belt was built to move the mud to waste ground on the other side of the railway, where it was left to settle and dry out over several decades - now it's a park, city farm and allotments.

PalenQ

and a Wal-Mart (ASDA) store, right? Or is that one stop down?

PatrickLondon

Next stop along (Crossharbour) - but they're quite close together.

hetismij

Shepherd's Bush common was where shepherds rested before taking the flocks into the city to Smithfields market, maybe, or it could be named after someone called Sheppard as the are is called Sheppard's Bush Green in a 17c document. But that could just be a spelling mistake too.