Old St Pancras Churchyard, London

Soane box

Round the back of the refurbished and extended St Pancras station lies a secluded garden made up of the Old St Giles' burial ground and the churchyard of St Pancras, a quiet spot shaded by plane trees. Apart from two men sweeping leaves I had the place to myself, and I was certainly the only person there interested in making a pilgrimage to this small but oddly influential English building, the mausoleum of the great architect Sir John Soane and his family.

It's a typical Soane structure in its very personal Classicism, its handling of spaces and layers, its shallow dome, and its symbolism. His wife having died in 1815, Soane conceived this building in the following year. It is a series of layers. Innermost is a large chunk of Carrara marble; this is roofed by a small marble structure consisting of four Ionic columns and a canopy; this in turn is covered by a larger structure in Portland stone with a shallow dome; the whole is surrounded by a low wall. The dome's finial is a pine cone (a Classical symbol of renewal) surrounded by a snake swallowing its tail (symbolizing eternity).

The monument is a fascinating bringing-outdoors of several of Soane's interior obsessions – domes, narrow spaces, those segmental slivers beneath the dome, the symbolic language, and so on. It's arresting, seems simple until you examine the careful and complex art with which it's put together, is completely non-Christian, and very typical of its architect's vision. Soane, though, deeply in mourning for his wife and troubled by domestic arrangements and disputes over her effects, found it hard to visit the monument once it was up.

Architectural pilgrims, however, have no such qualms. No doubt one of the most admiring was Giles Gilbert Scott, whose classic design for the red telephone box seems to have been heavily influenced by the monument. How odd that this rarified and personal design should have inspired the creation of something so universal, that the language of mourning should be translated into a symbol of communication. Such are the anxieties of architectural influence, and such are their satisfactions.

Oxhill, Warwickshire

Samuel Beckett, as ever, puts it so well: ‘Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards. I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.’* You will often find me taking the air in graveyards and I find their rewards – crosses, lychgates and, above all, gravestones – rich, varied, and far from musty. And so, as I probably will again, I digress in this post from buildings to their settings and surroundings, and to what can be read on one stone near a country church in Warwickshire.

Eighteenth-century gravestones are amongst the most beautiful of all, often carved in a chunky vernacular style with everything from swags to skulls. Their characterful, sometimes spindly and often lichen-covered lettering delineates the lives of many thousands of people of whom otherwise we know nothing, a faint trace caught by the rising or declining sun.

At Oxhill, another of the places near the Fosse Way that I was exploring recently, the most fascinating stone is one of the smallest. It marks the grave of Myrtilla, ‘Negro Slave to Mr Thomas Beauchamp of Nevis’, who died in 1705. The burial register refers to Myrtilla as ‘a Negro Girl of Mrs Beauchamp’s’. Thomas Beauchamp was a member of the local family that once held Warwick Castle and his wife came from nearby Idlicote. They owned land on Nevis – a document of 1744 records a Thomas Beauchamp, perhaps this one or his son, also Thomas, selling a sugar plantation there in 1744.

Not much else is known of Myrtilla, although one account alleges she was 72 when she died – this seems unlikely in view of her description as a ‘Girl’ in the burial register, and the source of this figure is elsewhere unreliable. A footstone, matching this headstone, would have recorded her age, but the footstones in this churchyard were moved in the 1970s. So all that’s left is a stone and a name – the kind of shadowy vestige that makes the traveller pause in a sunlit churchyard in the middle of England.

* Samuel Beckett, First Love (first English publication, 1973)