This continues the description of Camden parishes not found on www.ancestry.co.uk To help visualise where in London these are, an outline map of parishes in St Pancras 1903 can be found on the genuki website: http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/genuki/MDX/StPancras/outline.htm

St Mary Brookfield is only a short walk downhill from St Anne’s Brookfield. Although it resides in the modern borough of Camden, the church is literally across the road from the borough of Islington. Formerly in the civil parish of St Pancras and the old Pancras registration district, it is referred to as St Mary, Dartmouth Park Road (1875) in London Metropolitan Archives’ (LMA) records.

In contrast from St Anne’s, this church was built by public subscription for rich and poor parishioners. When it was dedicated in 1875, it was one of the first open-pew churches, allowing all classes to worship together. The Gothic Revival architect, William Butterfield, began work on the church in 1869, but refused to complete the building as a result of “certain unpleasanteries” which occurred on the completion of the nave (T. F. Bumpus, London churches ancient and modern, 2nd ser., p. 103). Other architects who worked on the church were WC Street (the chancel) and Sir Ninian Comper (the rood). The building was Grade II listed on 10 June 1954.

The parish is centred around the area of Dartmouth Park, just north of Kentish Town and Tufnell Park.  In the eighteenth century, the area was amongst vast fields owned by the eponymous Earl of Dartmouth. The park itself once stretched all the way from Highgate, but is now a small space, dominated by a reservoir tank. However, the park makes up for its size with its magnificent views of central London. From the mid-nineteenth century, the area saw continuous house building, and is now a popular residential area close to Hampstead Heath.

Neighbours of the church in its early years included the impresario of Gilbert & Sullivan operas, Richard D’Oyly Carte, who lived at 2 Dartmouth park road. A blue plaque was recently unveiled there by the director, Mike Leigh (http://www.camdennewjournal.com/news/2010/dec/blue-plaque-unveiled-theatre-impresario-who-brought-together-gilbert-and-sullivan-film )

The first vicars of the parish were Daniel John Twemlow-Cooke (from 1877), Philip Harold Rogers (1907), Charles Reginald Dalton (1928) and Frederick Salmon Vaughan (1945).

LMA holds Assignment of Consolidated Chapelry of St Mary, Brookfield (ref. P83/JNE/91 21 Dec. 1877), but the parish registers are retained by the church. The church’s own website is http://www.stmarybrookfield.com/

Further information can be found at https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Brookfield_St_Mary,_Middlesex

For more on the social classes of the parish, see the following page from Charles Booth’s Archive is at http://booth.lse.ac.uk/notebooks/b356/jpg/54.html (Booth B356, p54)

Sources: Survey of London: volume 24: The parish of St Pancras part 4: King’s Cross Neighbourhood, Walter H. Godfrey and W. McB. Marcham (editors), 1952; The Buildings of England London 4: North. Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner. ISBN 0-300-09653-4.

John Richardson, A History of Camden: Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras (Historical Publications Ltd, 1999)