Private Blog 1
Arriving Without a Place
The Methods of Investigating brief arrived at a time when London still felt like a puzzle I didn’t know how to solve. We were asked to choose a small, specific site and investigate it through methods like note-taking, photographing, sketching, mapping, or collecting, to look closely enough to uncover hidden or overlooked meanings.
But I had only been in the city for three days.
The only space I knew well was the Tottenham Hale station, where I spent my time switching between the Victoria Line and Greater Anglia. I tried to turn the station into my site: photographing people rocked to sleep on the train, the yellow line, barriers, the residue of movement. But nothing connected. The space felt too transient, too restless. Every tutor told me to narrow down, and I felt myself drifting further away from anything meaningful.
It wasn’t until week two, while running errands across the city, that everything shifted.
The Gate I Almost Walked Past
I stumbled upon a narrow brick entrance that people rushed through like a shortcut. Something about it made me pause. I stepped in.
And suddenly, I was in St Pancras Gardens.
The noise of the street fell away. The air changed. It was early autumn, greens softening into yellow, and the rows of tall, lean trees made the whole space feel held, almost illuminated. It felt like the garden had been waiting for someone willing to actually look.
This is where the real investigation began.
A Walk That Became a Story
The Soane Tomb
The first thing that drew me in was the Soane Tomb, a rectangular canopy-like monument unlike anything I’d seen before. Two cherubs sat on one side, while the opposite side held only empty panels where matching cherubs once were. Their absence felt strangely tender.
Two beds of red flowers lay at its base.
Without reading a plaque, I could feel the devotion embedded in it, a husband’s tribute to his wife. Later I learned the structure inspired the design of London’s iconic red telephone booths. A small, unexpected lineage of love influencing the city.
Scattered Memories
Deeper into the garden, memorials were scattered in every shape imaginable:
- angled slabs
- tall plaques
- low crib-like structures
- flat stones embedded in the earth
They stood far apart, disordered and individual — like memory itself.
The evening light turned the trees into glowing pillars of green and gold.
It felt like walking through a lantern.
The Burdett-Coutts Sundial Memorial
Then came the towering Burdett-Coutts Memorial Sundial, surrounded by alternating hedges and railing. At first I noticed something small: a dog statue, calm and sweet, sitting on a block of stone. When I circled the memorial, I saw the pattern:
- dog
- lion
- dog
- lion
Four guardians sitting poised, protective, never fierce.
The central spire rose sharply in Gothic detail, intricate carvings, a sundial, and a presence that demanded attention. Only later did I learn the woman behind it:
Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, one of Victorian Britain’s greatest philanthropists, called The Queen of the Poor. She fought London’s slums, changed thousands of lives, and was the first woman granted a peerage.
Knowing that made the memorial feel unbelievably full, a structure built not for ego, but for gratitude. One of the dogs was even modelled after her own Border Collie.
A Little Life Around Me
Not everyone in the garden engaged with the space the way I did. A few groups were loud, distracted, simply passing through, moments that briefly pulled me out of my immersion. But even that contrast showed how history and everyday life coexist here, often without touching.
Then I noticed an elderly woman circling the Hardy Tree mound with the same quiet reverence I felt. We exchanged a small nod, a recognition that we were there with intention.
The Hardy Tree — Absence as Presence
The Hardy Tree’s enclosure appeared before me: hedges and railings forming a circle, but the tree itself was gone. Instead, I saw a mound of gravestones, dozens of them, leaning inward as if being drawn to the centre. Curved and rectangular slabs piled into a strangely organic, unsettling shape.
It didn’t look natural. gravestones aren’t natural in nature anyway, but this looked pulled, gathered, almost swallowed.
Later, I learned the story:
In the 1860s, during the construction of the Midland Railway, a young Thomas Hardy, then an architect, was tasked with exhuming bodies from the old churchyard and relocating their headstones. They were arranged around an ash tree, which over more than a century grew through them, pulling them inward with its roots.
The mound was not chaos.
It was time doing what time does.
The ash tree fell in 2022 after disease hollowed it from within. Only its roots remain, still wrapped around the memorial stones it once held upright. A story now invisible unless someone tells it.
Standing there, I felt grief, not just for the tree, but for all the forgotten histories London carries quietly underfoot.
The Church and the Pathways of Memory
The old St Pancras Church stood nearby, familiar to me in a way that reminded me of churches in Ooty. I entered through the back pathway, pebbled ground, scattered memorial benches, small dedicated plaques beside older stones. Some memorials were recent; others centuries old. Grief layered across time.
Then I realised the path I was walking on wasn’t just stone,
it was broken, repurposed memorial slabs, still lying in their original resting place. Names eroded. Letters vanished.
Memory beneath our feet without us even knowing.
Inside, I learned the church dates back to the 4th century, with Norman walls still standing, and a history so vast it felt almost impossible to grasp. If this land could speak, its stories would be unfathomable.
Leaving the Garden
They call St Pancras Gardens one of London’s “best-kept secrets,” and I understand why. I uncovered more than a site, I uncovered stories, absences, transformations, devotions, and traces of love left behind in stone.
And in the middle of that, people were moved too.
My entire tutorial group now wants to walk the garden with me, publication in hand, following my footsteps and seeing the space through a pair of freshly attentive eyes.
For the first assignment of a new life in London, I could not have asked for a more grounding beginning.
Yes — I will absolutely count this as a win.