Here’s another one of those easily-missed features beneath our feet, and a sad necessity in our modern age: the boundary marker.

After all, you need to know where your responsibilities end and someone else’s begin, don’t you? Especially when costs are involved, as they are (or were) with the civil parishes shown on these stones.

This type of parish boundary marker was not that uncommon at the end of the 19^th century in London - kerb stones inscribed with the names (or initials) of the two parishes and a line to mark the actual location of the boundary. More common was the fixing of stone or metal plaques onto buildings, but these kerb stone markers do survive in a few locations.

In this example, SPL is St Pancras (London) and SGB is St George’s Bloomsbury, and 1899 indicates when the kerb stone was made and set in place.

If you want to read more about this sort of thing, head over to this web site, where a considerable body of research has been made available on this very topic. A fascinating site for anoraks like me :-)