1. Amazingly, unrecognized by Pevsner (and joint editor Bridget Cherry) in The Buildings of England: London 4: North (London: Penguin Books, 1998).

Why the Boston? Nobody seems to know. A puzzle. Not even Mr Pat Murray, the landlord, knows, though he tells me some hundred or so years ago it was informally known as the ‘Cattleman’s Hotel’ from the herders taking their cattle to the nearby Metropolitan Cattle Market (Caledonian Market). There’s a void here. An obvious job for folk etymology.

It first appears in local directories in 1860 and for a brief period was renamed the Boston Hotel.

2. Pevsner/Cherry, as above, claim that it is ‘bounded by Camden, Brecknock and Tufnell Park Roads’, p. 703, but without explaining their reasoning, which may, perhaps, be based on estate development. However, signing off on this theory would allow Tufnell Park to claim Holloway Prison as its own when we all know it belongs to ‘Camden Road’…or is it Holloway? Don’t be misled by what it calls itself.

3. The style of local history characterized by the late W. G. Hoskins as being the materials of history and not history itself.

Of the 21,000 or so items catalogued in a recent London bibliography only one boasts the word ‘Tufnell’ in its title, a slim volume of family history: Heather Creaton (ed.), Bibliography of Printed Works on London History to 1939 (London: Library Association, 1994). I haven’t been able to trace anything after that cut-off date.

4. One of the five four-storey blocks arranged around courtyards put up by the St Pancras Housing Association and completed in 1938. Prior to that my father and his sister together with their mother lived in Melton Street, hard by Euston Station, but were moved out owing to redevelopment. Their house was in plain sight of the famous Euston Arch or, more correctly, propylaeum, which was wantonly demolished in 1962.

5. I always thought it a strange un-English-sounding word, ‘Tufnell’. It was the Tufnell family who owned land here from the 1700s onwards. The surname isn’t included in three major name dictionaries I checked. The name is frequently seen now on the vans of a parcel-delivery company but spelled with two fs.

As a child I saw many street names here that struck me as strange: Chetwynd, Ingestre, Brecknock (what was a ‘brecknock’?), Twisden, Anson, Fortess and Lady Somerset (who she?).

6. Some forty years later I’d be looking at one of the sheets of Edward Stanford’s magnificent six-inch-to-the-mile Library Map of London and Its Suburbs (1862) and would see that this was the Fleet River.

7. Probably a dignified refashioning of ‘midden’, meaning a dunghill or manure heap, among other things, and oft applied jocularly to a muddy road.

Maiden Lane’s antiquity can be demonstrated by a simple fact: the boundary of the old parish of St Pancras runs up the middle of the road all the way from King’s Cross to Highgate. Such boundaries follow existing features. So, as we know, parishes evolved in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, therefore the lane is at least as old as that. I suspect, however, it may even be pre-Roman in origin.

This, incidentally, puts the Boston and the Underground station in the former parish of Islington.

For a large-scale mapshowing the St Pancras boundary, see Frederick Sinclair (compiler), Catalogue of an Exhibition…Illustrating St Pancras through the Ages (London: St Pancras Public Libraries, 1938).

8. The locale has only been known as King’s Cross since around the 1830s from a statue of George IV that once stood here. The Great Northern Railway adopted it for the name of their London terminus in 1852 and it was thus perpetuated. The earlier name, Battlebridge, was a corruption of a word meaning ‘broad or wide ford’ (over the Fleet River). See Gover, Mawer, Stenton, The Place Names of Middlesex (Cambridge: CUP-EPNS, 1942), pp. 140– 41.

9. The section upto Tufnell Park tube was renamed Fortess Road in 1879, a name taken from a field here. Its etymology is unknown.

10. I base this on Stanford’s 1862 mapnoted above.

11. Tim Demuth, The Spread of London’s Underground (London: Capital Transport, 2003), p. 12. A wonderful book – the development of the Underground-Tube system in a series of schematic maps with copious notes.

12. The last London trolley bus ran in 1962.

13. Yes, there were still cobbles then. Last month, February 2005, I was driving along behind St Pancras Station, where the redevelopment for the Channel train service is taking place, and saw a section of St Pancras Road that had had the tarmac burned and stripped off. There were the cobbles still. They’d never gone away.

14. My maternal grandmother, who was born in 1900 shortly after Lord Roberts’s entry into Pretoria during the Boer War, hence her middle name. Her sister, Elizabeth, born two years later, boasted the middle name of Mafeking. We were a patriotic lot.