King’s Cross Station (1977)

King’s Cross Station (opened 1850) has long been overshadowed by its neighbour St Pancras (opened 1867).  That was precisely the intention of the directors of the Midland Railway, the designer of the St Pancras train-shed, William Henry Barlow, and the architect George Gilbert Scott, whose Midland Grand Hotel was intended, until the railway directors insisted on cutting it down to size, to be two storeys higher than the existing building.

King’s Cross is actually well worth a look.  Built for the Great Northern Railway by Lewis Cubitt, it originally had only two platforms.  As traffic built up, its operation became notoriously chaotic, right into the 1930s when the signalling was sorted out just as the entire station threatened to seize up.

The original train-shed was built by the Wiebeking System of laminated timber construction, a pioneering effort to cover a wide space that eventually had to be replaced by iron girders.

Lewis Cubitt’s elegant, understated façade has for long been obscured:  it was revealed once more in 2013.

What King’s Cross lacks in visual impact it gains in its stories.

Queen Boudicea is reputed to be buried somewhere under platforms 8, 9 and 10.  Indeed, the area was known as Battle Bridge, commemorating the formidable queen’s last stand, until a much-derided monument to George IV briefly occupied the site.

The station featured with St Pancras in the 1955 film The Ladykillers, and the Hogwarts Express famously departed from Platform 9¾ in the Harry Potter books and films.

King’s Cross Station was the scene of a wonderful encounter between Ann Widdecombe and an Irishman who flung his arms round her in the middle of the concourse:  “He wanted to thank me for the peace process in Northern Ireland,” she remarked.

It’s also the pretext for a little-known story about the Abdication.

In late 1936 Mrs Wallis Simpson apparently took a taxi from her London residence to catch her train for a weekend up north.  “King’s Cross,” she said to the driver.

“I’m sorry to hear that, madam,” he replied.

Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras: grand staircase (1977)

George Gilbert Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel was once the finest place to stay in London but from 1935, when it was converted to railway offices, it stood neglected and increasingly dirty, and in the 1960s it narrowly escaped demolition.

I first knew it well in the 1970s when I brought adult-education groups from the north Midlands to visit sites in London by rail.  I had a deal with a British Rail group-travel organiser I won’t name (even though he’s deceased), whereby if I took the group round the back of the old hotel and presented the man who answered the door with a brown envelope we more or less had the run of the building.

At that time the lower floors were offices for the British Rail catering division, Travellers’ Fare, and the upper storeys had only recently been vacated by restaurant-car crews who had used them as sleeping accommodation on overnight turns.

We would climb to the top of the building in the ancient lift and tramp on to the roof above Euston Road, noticing that each chimney-stack was numbered to assist the chimney sweeps.  We went inside the clock tower to admire the clock.

And we enjoyed the astonishing three-storey main staircase under its Gothic vault painted with stars.  The first time we went the original fitted carpet was still in position, with the faded patch where the German band positioned their harmonium until they abruptly departed in 1914.

In the reception area we wondered at the bracket clock, still being wound weekly by a clockmaker whose contract had not been cancelled in 1935.

The offices closed in 1988 when British Rail was refused renewal of the fire certificate.  Although the exterior was cleaned and restored in the 1990s, finding a use for an obstinately sturdy Grade I listed building took time, and was eventually kick-started by the decision to adapt the under-used station for Eurostar.

At last the building has come back to life.  The upper storeys of the original hotel are converted into luxury apartments by the Manhattan Loft Corporation, and the remainder, with a new, sympathetically designed extension on Midland Road, is a Marriott Renaissance Hotel which opened in 2011.

Mike Higginbottom offers a one-hour lecture, St Pancras Station, including images taken from the mid-1970s onwards.  For further details, please click here.

St Pancras Station (1977)

My Isle of Man friend John asks interesting questions.

When he disembarked at King’s Cross Station (after pausing to photograph his late-teenage son Matthew in front of Platform 9¾) he crossed the road to St Pancras and texted me “Why are the trains at St Pancras upstairs?”.

The answer is the Regent’s Canal.

When the first railway into London, the London & Birmingham, was built in 1837 the engineer Robert Stephenson tunnelled under the canal to reach the site of Euston terminus.  The fact that this created a stiff incline out of the station wasn’t an immediate concern, because trains were initially cable-hauled to Camden Town where locomotives were attached.  Subsequently, steam locomotives always had to work hard on the climb out of Euston.

In the late 1840s the competing Great Northern Railway was built into King’s Cross Station.  Its engineers, Sir William and Joseph Cubitt, also tunnelled under the Regent’s Canal, creating a challenging 1 in 107 gradient for steam locomotives and a constricted exit from the station, the “Throat”, leading to Gas Works and Copenhagen tunnels.

William Henry Barlow, the engineer of the Midland Railway, chose the alternative when his company’s London Extension approached the site of St Pancras station in the mid-1860s.  He bridged the canal, so that the terminus platforms are fifteen feet higher than the street level. His magnificent train shed, with its uninterrupted arch 240 feet wide and 100 feet high, is engineering elegance in every sense:  not only does it look superb, but the ties beneath the platforms mean that a heavy locomotive could safely sit at any point without overloading the floor.

Pedestrians and taxis have always approached the platforms by ramps and stairs, and travellers used not to be aware of the vast undercroft below the platforms.  This – now revealed as The Arcade and the Eurostar booking area – was intended to store Burton beer, brought down the line and lowered by a hydraulic lift from track level.  Indeed the entire station is built to a module of 14 feet 8 inches, the dimensions of the Victorian beer barrel.

It’s no coincidence that one of the Midland Railway directors was Michael Thomas Bass Jnr, and that in the years after excise duty was removed from beer glasses in 1845, the dark London porter traditionally served in pewter tankards gradually gave way to the lighter ales brewed in Burton.

In the days before Eurostar, the undercroft was the rumoured location of the apocryphal “St Pancras Hoard”, silverware hidden when the Midland Grand Hotel closed in 1935.

Now at last, thanks to the redesign of the station in 2003, it’s possible walk off the street and reach the trains by lift or escalator.  As you walk into the former undercroft and gaze up at the train shed above, your spirits will be lifted by the colour of the arches – “English Heritage Barlow Blue”.

The ironwork was originally brown, until in 1877 the general manager of the Midland Railway, James Allport, remarked, “Why cannot the train shed be the colour of the sky?” In the age of steam it didn’t stay sky-coloured for long;  now W H Barlow’s wonderful space, reglazed to its original pattern, has become one of the most exciting sights in the capital.

Mike Higginbottom offers a one-hour lecture, St Pancras Station, including images taken from the mid-1970s onwards.  For further details, please click here.