Leverton and Sons Ltd is a family owned company of funeral directors, which has been established within the St Pancras area of London for over two hundred years. Its beginnings are to be found in the parish register of St Michael’s Church in the village of Meeth, in the county of Devon, which records the baptism of John, son of George and Susannah Leverton on 27 January 1763. It was John who later packed his bags and travelled to London to set up business as a carpenter/builder.

The origin of the name Leverton is given as Leofa’s-tun, being the tun or hamlet belonging to an Anglo Saxon known as Leofa. There are still five places in Devon bearing the name under various spellings, but research suggests that the most likely source of the surname was the village of Livaton in the parish of South Tawton, near Okehampton. Whatever the truth, it is known from parish records that the family resided in the Torridge valley area for at least eleven generations, first in the village of Iddesleigh, then upstream in the nearby village of Dolton, before John’s grandfather moved to Meeth with his wife and two sons in the mid 1730s.

To John, coming from a Devonshire village, eighteenth century London must have seemed a vast place. Although the parish of St Pancras still retained a relatively rural air the city was rapidly expanding and by the end of the eighteenth century a great deal of new building was transforming the surrounding fields. Leases dated 1789, 1791 and 1794 show John Leverton, in partnership with others, buying land and selling the houses he built on them. This early form of property development was conducted first in Brook Street (now Stanhope Street) and then from John’s workshops in Henry Street (now Seaton Place) and probably played a part in the transformation of the area.