St Pancras Old Church

The lowdown

A few minutes behind the roar of King's Cross and St Pancras lies a pocket of deep history that almost no commuter visits. St Pancras Old Church is reckoned to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England, and the church and its leafy churchyard are free to wander.

The churchyard is famous for two things. It was here that the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Mary Shelley, courted the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at her mother's graveside, dreaming up the world that would become Frankenstein. And when the railways cut through the burial ground in the 1860s, a young architect named Thomas Hardy, later the novelist, was given the grim job of clearing graves, and stacked hundreds of displaced headstones in tight rings around an ash tree, now known as the Hardy Tree.

It is a quiet, slightly melancholy and deeply atmospheric free green space, layered with stories, a world away from the stations a stone's throw to the south.