Saturday, January 19, 2008

St Pancras vs King's Cross - The Best and Worst of Stations

A little late to the party here but I had my first visit to the 'new' St Pancras on Thursday. I arrived there from Sheffield and it was truly impressive. I didn't have time to linger because I had to meet a friend but I would live to have spent longer there and had a good look around. Work began on the station in 1866 and two years later the 'shed' was completed and was at the time the largest enclosed space in the world. In 1966 Sir John Betjeman mounted a campaign to stop it from being combined with Kings Cross station which is just next door. Thank God he did. I left from Kings Cross that night to come home and it showed the difference between the best and worst in London stations.

7 comments:

Richard Thomson said...

I went from St Pancras to Brussels on the Eurostar just before Christmas and the station is pretty special. Mind you, at £800 million, or nearly two Scottish Parliaments worth, you'd expect it to be :-)

Richard Havers said...

Ah, yes, but Richard, St Pancras is beautiful and the Scottish Parliament is......

Richard Thomson said...

...too?

Richard Havers said...

che? :)

Richard Thomson said...

:-)

r morris said...

Beautiful! Much like back when the United States had mass transit...only better!

Anonymous said...

John Betjeman may be the only poet who has ever ranged so comprehensively across the family budget. Who else immortalised 'Banana Blush' and railways and small churches and Woolworths and the Co-op ad the Regent Palace? He is certain, now to be the last.'
(Frank Delaney).

Rehan Qayoom takes us on an excursion through the London immortalised by the most popular poet of the twentieth century to take a fresh look at his haunts. His language, being both brilliantly nostalgic and entertainingly à la mode, has the warmth and lyricism of the late Poet Laureate. It introduces us to the relish of a time long gone into the footnotes of twentieth century social histories with our feet firmly grounded in the twenty-first.

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