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Wanda Garland,artist |
Memories of old King’s Cross rescued from concrete
THE steps down into the station concourse had become like a jumbo jet’s exhaust pipe, and for Ray Knight, a station supervisor at King’s Cross, it was a sight that will live with him for the rest of his life.
“The smoke was just coming out like a furnace, you couldn’t stand it, it was just roaring out there. It was absolutely phenomenal,” he remembers.
“The whole concourse was full of black smoke and the entrance to the side was actually roaring, it was like an exhaust from a jet engine, it was coming out that fast. That powerful. I’d never seen anything like it.”
The traumatic recollection of that fateful night of November 18 1987, when 31 people were killed in a fire which started in an escalator shaft in King’s Cross, is one of a collection of memories featuring in a new exhibition at the Camden Local Studies Archive.
From childhood memories during the First World War to the anecdotes of a man who drove a horse-drawn coal delivery carriage, the King’s Cross Voices exhibition uses recordings, photos and artefacts to capture a world disappearing under the tons of concrete being poured into the redevelopment of the railway lands.
The project was partly funded by the Heritage Lottery scheme and interviews recorded with local people took four years to complete.
Other memories record the battle people fought to clear the area of drugs and vice. Former Labour councillor Barbara Hughes remembers the 1980s.
“We had terrible problems,” she recalls. The vice trade had been boosted by young women who had come down from the North to work the streets because of the fear generated on their usual patches by the Yorkshire Ripper.
“There were a lot of very young women and there was very little drugs involved with it but nasty heavy pimps,” says Barbara. “It got so that the area was packed with people soliciting, loitering.”
Barbara joined with other people in the neighbourhood who said enough was enough. They went to Scotland Yard to demand action and lobbied the council.
Others voices include railway workers, students, shopkeepers, market traders, artists, campaigners, politicians, former sex trade workers, factory workers, housewives and publicans. Thelma Dowsett, who has lived in the area all her life, recalls visiting The Boot pub. There used to be three doors: saloon bar, door for the off-licence, then in through Speedy Passage into the public bar,” she says. “If one family had a couple of bob more than the other – it counted in those days, they were snobs – you went into the saloon bar, and if you didn’t you went into the public bar. We always went into the public bar because they played darts, dominoes and cards. The landlord was Bert Williams. He owned a Cadillac, always used to wear a big stetson, and smoke one of the biggest cigars you could ever see. Those were the days.”
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