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have been Roman finds near Gray’s Inn Road: two cremation urns. By contrast, the other route up Tottenham Court and Hampstead Road is not known to pass by any ancient settlement (Camden Town is modern – 1791, to be exact); the only significant building recorded there is the one from which the present day Tottenham Court Road takes its name, the manor house of Totenhale near the present Euston Road underpass, sometimes misleadingly called St John’s Palace, the earliest parts of which seem to have been mediaeval.
    In addition, two other roads concern us. One is the eastern fork from Gray’s Inn Road leading up York Way (anciently Maiden Lane), across Copenhagen Fields to Holloway, Hornsey and Muswell Hill. The Maiden Lane section was the eastern boundary of the ancient parish of St Pancras and of the manor of Cantelowes (of which much more later); it is still the eastern boundary of the modern metropolitan borough of Camden, and is also the farthest possible eastern limit of Kentish Town. The dual and contradictory nature of a road – a means of connection to those who travel it, a social demarcation line and barrier to those who live around it – is no new thing.
    The other road, a latecomer dating only from 1386, is the by-pass road for the above, built through Holloway and up Highgate Hill by the Bishop of London, who charged tolls for its use (hence High-gate).
    There is yet another road which ultimately became important in shaping the whole northern inner-suburb area. It determined the position of the three big stations, Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross, and thus had a profound effect on the later development of Kentish Town. But it was constructed so many centuries after even the Bishop of London’s road that it hardly seems relevant to this chapter. This was the New Road, deliberately built as a by-pass through uninhabited fields in the mid-eighteenth century, and one of the few far-sighted road schemes for London which did become reality. Today, it is called the Marylebone Road, Euston Road and Pentonville Road. It was in 1800, and still is today, the demarcation line where central London gives way to more outlying parts. We shall return to it.

    When the area north of London was surveyed at the time of the Norman Conquest, it consisted mainly of forest, infested by outlaws, robbers and beasts of prey. Trees and scrub are the natural vegetation of a large part of England. The first mention of St Pancras church as such occurs at the period of the Conquest, but there seems to have been some form of clearing and settlement in the vicinity of the church – or a church – hundreds of years before this, probably since about AD 400. At any rate St Pancras was made a prebendal manor by King Ethelbert and granted by him to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral in 603.
    Slowly over the centuries we now call ‘dark’, a few changes took place. By the time of the Domesday Survey (1086) four manors are recorded, though one is not called a manor, plus some other land, covering roughly the area that was to become the Borough of St Pancras (merged into Camden in 1965 when the LCC became the GLC). The named manors were St Pancras itself, Totehele (Totenhale) and Rugmere. Each manor had a plough or two (Totenhale had three and ‘another half can be made’), each had its handful of villeins, some pastureland, and ‘wood for hedges and for pigs’.
    Almost exactly a hundred years after the Domesday Survey, the propagandist FitzStephen wrote in his ‘Survey of the Metropolis’ that the St Pancras district had ‘cornfields, pastures and delightful meadows, intermixed with pleasant streams, on which stands many a mill whose clack is grateful to the ear.’ The number of mills (typical service industries) suggests that the area had already embarked on the beginnings of its long-time special role as country-by-the-town. FitzStephen added that the cornfields were not of a hungry, sandy mould but ‘as the fruitful