In 2019 I found myself helping out with the music at the lovely early nineteenth-century church of St Clement King Square in Islington (London) where – following rebuilding work in the 1950s – a second-hand organ was installed, taken from the newly redundant church of St Thomas Agar Town, near Kings Cross (London). Here is a little post about Agar Town and its church, all now long vanished.
In 1816 William Agar (1767-1838), a lawyer from Lincoln’s Inn, acquired from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners a 21-year lease on land south of present-day Agar Grove and built there a mansion for himself; Elm Lodge. Extensions were applied to the lease in 1822 and again in 1839 (following Agar’s death) on behalf of his son, also named William (1814–1907).
Agar’s son began to issue his own 21-year building leases on small strips of his land and thus developed the neighbourhood known as Agar Town, a shanty of hastily built housing and workshops. While Agar Town survived little more than 21 years, its reputation as a noted place of urban poverty remains.
Time was when the wealthy owner of a large estate had lived here in his mansion; but after his departure the place became a very ’abomination of desolation’ […] a dreary and unsavoury locality, abandoned to mountains of refuse from the metropolitan dust-bins, strewn with decaying vegetables and foul-smelling fragments of what once had been fish, or occupied by knackers’-yards and manure-making, bone-boiling, and soap-manufacturing works, and smoke-belching potteries and brick-kilns. At the broken doors of multilated houses canaries still sang, and dogs lay basking in the sun […] and from these dwellings came out wretched creatures in rags and dirt, and searched amid the far-extending refuse for the filthy treasure by the aid of which they eked out a miserable livelihood; whilst over the whole neighbourhood the gas-works poured forth their mephitic vapours, and the canal gave forth […] upon the surface of the water […] a thick scum of various and ominous hues. Such was Agar Town before the Midland Railway came into the midst of it.”
As the Agar’s – and their tenants’ – various 21-year leases expired or were abandoned the Church Commissioners steadily took back ownership of the site and began planning improvements. In 1860 construction began on the first permanent church on Elm Road in Agar Town (to be dedicated to St Thomas) and a school, both designed by S. S. Teulon (1812–73).
However, within just a couple of years the Commissioners sold almost all of its Agar Town land to the Midland Railway “for a considerable sum” to accommodate the Midland Railway’s rapidly expanding infrastructure associated with the new St Pancras station. Within just two months of the sale Agar Town was cleared – including its incomplete church and school site – all to be replaced with railway sidings; and the remaining Agar Town inhabitants moved to neighbouring districts like Kentish Town.
The second church: Elm Road/Wrotham Road
The Church Commissioners used some of the money it earned from selling most of its Agar Town land to create on the remainder some new streets of substantial middle-class housing and to build another church of St Thomas – also by Teulon – at the junction of Elm Road and Wrotham Road, 1863-4. This church – damaged by aerial bombing in the Second World War – was demolished after 1953, the parish being absorbed into St Michael’s Camden Town. However, the church’s organ survived, being rebuilt at St Clement King Square, London EC1.
It is somewhat ironic that the railway infrastructure that swept away Agar Town has itself now been swept away to be replaced by housing, and (high-tech) workplaces. Plus ça change … …
The pipe organ
The first organ in the church was a loan instrument by the firm of Gray and Davison (NPOR; DBOB). In 1868 a permanent instrument was provided by the firm of T. C. Lewis (Musical Standard, 28 March, 1868).
The third organ in St Thomas Wrotham Road was installed in 1875 by the local firm of Henry Willis; a two-manual mechanical-action, hand-blown instrument located in the south cnacel aisle (NPOR). It remained unaltered throughout its life there. (Morrell). At the demolition of the church the organ was moved to St Clement, King Square and rebuilt there.
References
- Agar Town: Life and Death of a Victorian Slum. Steven Denford. (London: Camden History Society, 1995).
- ‘Agar Town‘. The Underground Map. Onlune resource, accessed 6 Janiary 2020.
- ‘Agar Town‘. Wikipedia. Online resource accessed 6 January 2020
- ‘Agar Town, Camden’. Hidden London. Online resource accessed 6 January 2020.
- ‘Database of Organ Builders’ (DBOB). National Pipe Organ Register (NPOR). Online resource, accessed 14 January 2020.
- ‘From Cripplegate to Agar Town: London’s vanished neighbourhoods‘. Tom Bolton. The Guardian (
- Mapping Poverty in Agar Town: Economic Conditions Prior to the. Development of St. Pancras Station in 1866. (Series: ‘Working Papers on The Nature of Evidence: How Well Do ‘Facts’ Travel?’ No. 09/06) Steven P. Swensen (2006). LSE-eprints. Online resource, accessed 7 January 2020.
- ‘The Parish of St Pancras: additional churches‘. Survey of London: King’s Cross Neighbourhood. Ed. Walter H Godfrey and W McB. Marcham (London: London County Council , 1952). Online Resourc.e British History Online. Online resource, accessed 6 January 2020.
- Railways and the Western European Capitals: Studies of Implantation in London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels. M. Nilsen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Google Books. Online resource, accessed 7 January 2020.
- ‘St Thomas, Agar Town‘. National Pipe Organ Register (NPOR). Online resource, accessed 14 January 2020.
- “The story of Agar Town : the ecclesiastical parish of St. Thomas’, Camden Town” R. Conyers Morrell, (London: the author, 1935)
- ‘William Agar‘. Camden New Town History Wiki. Online resource, acccessed 7 January 2020.
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