The tree became a powerful symbol of life among death after the novelist and poet stacked gravestones around its base in the 1860s
The Hardy Tree, named for the writer who stacked gravestones around the base of the ash when both man and plant were young in the 1860s, has fallen down., was surrounded by dozens of headstones that were placed at its base while engineering works were being undertaken on a railway line. It became a prominent image of life among death.
Thomas Hardy, not yet the celebrated writer he would become, was employed as a young architect in the office of Arthur Blomfield, in Covent Garden, London. The firm got the commission from the bishop of London to disinter a large number of graves from Old St Pancras cemetery. The Midland Railway was about to thunder its way through to what is now the Kings Cross–St Pancras station complex and it needed the consecrated earth for its rails.
Hardy received the instruction for mass exhumation and decent reburial elsewhere. The church’s website called the tree a “monument to the railway encroachments of the 19th century”.A Robin redbreast sings it heart out in song atop the stump of the fallen historic Hardy Tree in St Pancras Gardens - Somewhat poetic
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