Light Up The Rain

I couldn’t write a post about St Pancras station without a quick addendum about its near-neighbour Euston.

Although I work in Birmingham, I’m fortunate enough to rarely have to travel to London from the West Midlands.

Here – for those who don’t frequent Euston – is why I count myself lucky. It redefines ”grim”.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s how the station is characterised by the Euston Arch Trust:

Designed in the International Modern style, its somewhat bleak style has been variously described as “hideous”, “a dingy, grey, horizontal nothingness”, “an ugly desecration of a formerly impressive building”, a reflection of “the tawdry glamour of its time” entirely lacking of “the sense of occasion, of adventure, that the great Victorian termini gave to the traveller”, and “the worst of the Central London terminuses, both ugly and unfriendly to use”.

Writing in The Times, Richard Morrison stated that “even by the bleak standards of Sixties architecture, Euston is one of the nastiest concrete boxes in London: devoid of any decorative merit; seemingly concocted to induce maximum angst among passengers; and a blight on surrounding streets. The design should never have left the drawing-board – if, indeed, it was ever on a drawing-board. It gives the impression of having been scribbled on the back of a soiled paper bag by a thuggish android with a grudge against humanity and a vampiric loathing of sunlight”.

If you really fancy a laugh, here’s the Trust’s resurrection (via PDF) of British Rail’s 1968 brochure published to celebrate the opening of the newly redeveloped station.

I adore St Pancras station, and the other day I realised a key reason why.

Artists’ impressions of any new development – or in this case, redevelopment – are normally an exercise in creative optimism.

So for a transport interchange, throw in happy travellers sitting outside wine bars, deep in animated conversation. Beautiful people skitting in and out of glamorous shops. Folks of all nationalities hugging as they’re reunited with their loved ones. Maybe a small art exhibition in one corner; a musician playing an impromptu gig in another. And around it all, the architecture itself – looking amazing no matter what the season or time of day.

You’ve probably guessed where I’m going with this. In the case of St Pancras, the reality – three years after it reopened, and against all odds – is exactly as envisaged. It’s an artist’s impression come to life, and more.

(“More” includes one thing you can’t capture in an architect’s plan: the wonderful mix of foreign accents around you, predominantly French, while you queue up to buy a coffee. Ah, parfait.)

As Martin Belam tweeted recently, comparing St Pancras to Paris’ Gare Du Nord:

There are nostalgic, partisan reasons why I love the station too.

As a kid, my journeys to London were generally limited to an annual pre-Christmas trip organised by the Nottingham Evening Post. In my late teens and early 20s, a trip to the capital was generally to do with my music career.

St Pancras was “my” station in London, and arriving there meant excitement.

To have the run-down, grimy train shed I remember growing up reinvented as what its pre-launch advertising called  - again, with rare accuracy – “Europe’s destination station” makes me strangely proud. (Thanks, Sir John Betjeman.)

Compare and contrast with its near-neighbour, Euston, using my favourite unscientific method: the Flickr test. There are 2,491 pictures on Flickr tagged “Euston station“, many – understandably – of trains rather than the station itself.

For ”St Pancras station“ there are 8,047.

Like the Selfridges building in Birmingham, people can’t resist taking photos on their way through – and rightly so.

I’ve included a few from Flickr below.

Now, if only some of the St Pancras fairy dust would fall on Birmingham New Street’s redevelopment, maybe this Facebook group‘s founding sentiment might one day no longer be true…