Mary Shelley lived in Somers Town and wrote Frankenstein.

‘Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.’

The literary invention and the monster from the novel Frankenstein, was the brainchild of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, a stone’s throw from here, in the Polygon, Somers Town, on 30 August 1797 and who lived in Somers Town for ten years.

Her mother died after giving birth to her, and she would regularly escape her home and visit her mother’s tombstone at the Old St Pancras Churchyard. Mary learnt to write her name by tracing her fingers on the stone.

There, she read all her mother’s books and, by 10 years old, knew them by heart. She also read Godwin’s infamous memoirs of Wollstonecraft at the tombstone.

Her father described her at the age 15:

‘Singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible.’

Mary Shelley wrote her short novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus in 1818, at just 19, while on holiday on Lake Geneva with her friends. With her were her lover and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and the physician John William Polidori – who would publish his own vampire story, “The Vampyre”, in 1819 and who died aged 25, likely by his own hand, depressed and in debt, in 1821. He, just as Mary Shelley’s mother, is buried in Old Saint Pancras Churchyard.

Cooped up against rain and damp in Switzerland, the friends read horror stories to each other and began to write their own for amusement. They continued with their work when back in London.

The Frankenstein Monster provides an enduring image of biomedical experimentation – the name persists for science perceived as scary or off-limits and a reminder of contemporary hybris.

When a vast biomedical research building landed in Somers Town in 2016, spectres of Frankenstein science appeared to some all too close for comfort.

“The most extraordinary piece of imagination and it is a very powerful sort of myth about how people are formed, what is expected of them”

– Writer and biographer of Wollstonecraft, Claire Tomalin, in interview.