The Midland Grand Hotel in euston Road in 1926 |
Our railway cathedral is a credit to Britain
The new St Pancras Station will be a jewel in the crown of the railways, writes Frank Dobson
St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley. Published by Profile Books, £14.99. order this book
ST Pancras is a fairly obscure saint with a very few churches in his name. But our area does him proud. Not content with Old St Pancras Church in Pancras Road and new St Pancras Church in Euston Road, he’s even got a huge cathedral. It’s called St Pancras Station. It’s what everybody thinks of when you mention St Pancras – the vast red-brick Victorian Gothic edifice – the supreme manifestation of the Victorian railway boom. As befits both the building and an author who is the editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides, Simon Bradley’s book reads like a guide to a great cathedral.
It starts with an excursion into the whole history of Victorian Gothic architecture and how it influenced George Gibert Scott, chosen by the directors of the Midland Railway to design their London terminus or, to be more precise, the Midland Grand Hotel and station offices. That’s because the other glory of St Pancras, the huge single arched ‘train shed’ which spans the lines and platforms, was designed not by Scott but by an engineer called William Henry Barlow. Indeed, as the book makes clear, Scott had to design his hotel and offices to ‘fit’ the Barlow train shed and position the exits and entrances for passengers and road vehicles as laid down by Barlow’s site plan.
The Midland Railway was in luck. Both architect and engineer brought confidence, competence and imagination to their task. Both displayed show-stopping genius. Barlow’s arch was the widest single span in the world. Scott’s hotel was the quintessence of Victorian luxury and corporate pride.
Between them, they designed and got built a station which both looked good and worked. Simon Bradley’s book explains how they did it and the engineering complexities they had to overcome.
It also explains how the Midlands region which was to be served by the new railway was the source of most of the bricks, stone and metal structures. And the cellars under the platforms were designed to store barrels of beer from Burton-on-Trent – three train-loads a day. The length of a beer barrel even became the unit of measurement for that part of the station. Sadly, the ‘Bass’ never took its place alongside, say, the ‘Watt’ which measures electricity or, dare I say it, the ‘Dobson’ which measures the ozone layer.
The book also touches upon the literary impact of the engineering works. The new railway tracks cut straight across the eastern part of the Old St Pancras churchyard. The removal, rearrangement and re-interment of the coffins and bones was supervised by Thomas Hardy, then a young understrapper with the architects responsible. So the odds are that Hardy’s memorable references to graves and graveyards in both his poetry and prose owe more to his macabre duties in St Pancras than to anything in his native Dorset. Surely it was over his work at St Pancras that he concluded:
“As well cry over a new laid drain
As anything else to ease your pain.”
The book doesn’t devote much space to the people who actually built the station. So we don’t know how many worked on the building, what their wages were, how many were injured or killed in the process, whether they were local or came to London specially for the work. It may be that all the records have been destroyed or even that no records were kept. But I would like to have known. One insight into Victorian society records that the hotel staff had separate staircases so that the upper-crust guests wouldn’t have to encounter them.
As the MP who represents Euston and King’s Cross stations as well as St Pancras, I am pleased that the book strays beyond its title to cover the other two which both pre-date St Pancras. Nothing remains of the 1837 Euston Station but King’s Cross still looks like it did when it opened in 1852. And that brings me to the present day with St Pancras being restored to more than its former glory. By the end of this year, St Pancras is to become the London Euro Terminal connected through the Channel Tunnel to the continental railway system. This service will be very fast and better for the environment than flying.
The journey to Paris will take less time than it took to get from St Pancras to Leicester when the station first opened.
The original scheme to bring the Channel Tunnel trains into a huge concrete box under King’s Cross Station was crazy and I suggested St Pancras instead. The engineering works have been a hell of a nuisance for local people. But the transformation of St Pancras Station, which makes good use of the original building, will enhance the whole area which has been blighted by decades of railway dereliction. The new St Pancras Station – a credit to Britain – should bring in new jobs for local people, not just at the station and hotel but in rejuvenated shops and restaurants, travel agents and the like. At long last the railway will benefit the lives of the good people who live round about instead of dragging them down.
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