Latest>May 6 - One Week With John Gulliver - We live in a borough that’s divided by dramatically unequal living standards

Published: 6 May, 2010

ONLY one magnificent flat, restored to a ravishing standard, remains unsold in the new symbol of wealth that stands arrogantly opposite Camden town hall.
But what that great Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott, who designed St Pancras station, and the facade known as St Pancras Chambers, would have made of it, I don’t know.
I am told by the developers, who specialised in New York conversions, the Manhattan Loft Corporation, that of the 67 apartments in St Pancras Chambers only one, a one-bedroom flat, with, I gather, a 10-metre high ceiling, is unsold. It’s price? A trifling £750,000.
Apparently, many of the other flats would have gone for up two million pounds each.
Now, the developers have done a splendid job.
No sooner did they convert the buildings – work, I believe, started about three years ago – than they started to successfully market them.
And what a rush of buyers they must have had for these unique thrilling flats.
Yet, I cannot help thinking of the extraordinary edifice they are part of – and who lives cheek-by-jowl with them.
Just a few hundred yards from these overwhelmingly beautiful flats, with their Gothic interiors, each bearing a touch of medievalism, are several run down blocks in Somers Town.
In St Pancras Chambers live people with an income, probably of more than £500,000 a year from jobs in big business or from unimaginably high investments.
By sharp contrast, in the Somers Town flats, pensioners and low income families live on a pittance, perhaps £100 a week or £5,000 a year.
As research carried out in the 1990s has shown, the mortality rate in Somers Town is several years lower than those in Hampstead – two parts of the same borough, but  home to people living such dramatically unequal lives.
I do not for a moment think less of the developers for their spectacular contribution to life in Euston Road.
No doubt they – as well as the new occupants of St Pancras Chambers – sit back and think it is the most exciting address in Britain. And so it is.
I can imagine, too, that when they describe their new abode to friends, they are met with expressions of amazement.
But, still, my mind turns untethered to those dark, neglected buildings in nearby Somers Town.