In the beginning
In 2009 the Saint Pancras Almshouse celebrated 150 years of existence on its present site with a series of events and exhibitions culminating in a summer garden party graced by the then Prince Charles, who could scarcely be dragged away from lively conversations with some of the residents. 
The original SPA charity was founded earlier than the anniversary events suggest. In 1850 the good Doctor Donald Fraser, a member of the Royal College of Physicians and senior churchwarden of St Pancras parish church, invited a group of worthies to form a committee. Its purpose was to oversee the provision of shelter “for those decayed but respectable parishioners who, at the close of lives spent in arduous but unsuccessful struggles for maintenance, find themselves reduced to accepting the painful and humiliating position of inmates of the workhouse”.
Generous donations soon came in from distinguished benefactors, including the future Baroness Burdett-Coutts, daughter of the noted banker, and Sir Horatio Regnart, vice-president of the fashionable Maples furniture store in Tottenham Court Road and the Almshouse patron after whom its elegant Regnart hall is named. A plot of pasture land was purchased for £1,000 on the North side of present-day Wilkin Street near Prince of Wales Road, with clear countryside views to Hampstead, Highgate and Kenwood.
A building soon went up housing 100 beneficiaries, but only for a short time. In 1859 the Hampstead & City Junction Railway acquired the site for its new line from Camden Town to Gospel Oak. After a fierce battle over compensation that went all the way to the Lord Justices’ Court, the present site in Southampton Road was bought for £1,300 and building began again. The South block, which today contains the office, was completed by 1861, soon followed by the other two blocks and finally the Regnart room in 1881.
