(rshsdepot) St. Pancras Station, London, UK

[I95BERNIEW_@_aol.com]

From The Guardian.
 
Bernie Wagenblast
 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
The miracle of St Pancras


Few British landmarks  are as widely loved as London's St Pancras station. 
Will the new Eurostar  terminal complement its Gothic extravagance - or clash 
horribly with it? A month  before the terminal's official opening, Jonathan 
Glancey gets an exclusive sneak  preview.
 
 
St Pancras was destined to be connected to the  continent ever since the day 
in 1877 when Sir George Gilbert Scott's magnificent  station and hotel were 
finally declared complete. And next month that destiny  will finally be 
realised, when the Queen launches the terminus into the world of  21st-century 
high-speed European rail travel. From November 14, Eurostar trains  will writhe out 
from under the station's unforgettable train shed roof through  new tunnels and 
£5.8bn-worth of newly forged engineering works to reach Paris  Gare du Nord 
in just two-and-a-quarter hours.  
Europe was  embedded in the station's architectural DNA from the very 
beginning. Just look  at the washed-and-brushed facade of the Midland Grand Hotel 
fronting the  magnificently restored and remodelled terminus. Scott's ambitious 
design for the  hotel and station clearly plundered the architectural 
treasuries of medieval  Europe. From the dust and soot of the Euston Road rose a 
Railway Age cathedral,  cloth hall and castle, all hammered and crafted into a 
convincing and  enthralling whole, borrowing spires, arches, corbels and crockets 
from Amiens,  Brussels, Ypres and all cardinal gothic points south through the 
Alps to Verona  and Venice.  
Scott's rich palette of building materials, meanwhile, was drawn as much from 
 the salmon-pink bricks specially baked for the job by Mr Gripper of 
Nottingham  as it was from the hues of churches that this intensely hard-working 
architect  had once admired in northern Italy.  
St Pancras himself, of whom precious little is known, is buried in Rome, a  
long way from the charred and soiled remains of the 19th-century slums of Agar  
Town that were demolished to make way for the Midland Railway's steamy 
entrance  into London.  
As for the connections with Paris, the Scott family was only too aware of  
these. George Gilbert Scott Jr, Sir Gilbert's son and another brilliant  
architect, ended his days, after a drunken and licentious reverie in Paris,  divorced 
and quite mad in one of the bedrooms of the Midland Grand - in the  
architectural clutches, as it were, of his famous father. Along the corridor  leading 
from Scott Jr's room, great Gothic vaults designed by Sir Gilbert had  only 
recently been adorned with paintings of Temperance and Chastity, virtues  
associated at the time with neither Paris nor Sir Gilbert's wayward son.  
Behind Scott's gothic phantasmagoria - a building "too good for its purpose", 
 said the architect - passengers found themselves beneath the roof of what  
remains one of the wonders of the railway world. This soaring, single-span  
iron-and-glass train shed was engineered by William Henry Barlow (1812-1902) and  
Rowland Mason Ordish (1824-1886), both of whom had worked with Joseph Paxton 
on  the design of the Crystal Palace, home in 1851 to the first of the great 
world  "expos". Their achievement was only overshadowed when Gustave Eiffel 
completed  his famous tower in time for the 1889 Paris Expo. Barlow's 
international career  had begun in distant Istanbul, while, after St Pancras, Ordish went 
on to work  in Bombay, St Petersburg and Singapore, shaping the roof of 
Amsterdam's Central  station along the way.  
St Pancras, then, was an international station of sorts long before the  
completion of the new 68-mile high-speed link that will see Eurostar trains  
racing under the Thames flood plains and through Kent to Ashford and so on via  the 
Channel tunnel, when they will join Europe's ever-growing network of 300kph  
(185mph) electric railways.  
It is hard to believe that all this might not have existed, as you walk into  
St Pancras today through brand new gothic doors and enter the station's  
previously unseen undercroft, the former storage basement with its 800 Victorian  
iron pillars, where the Eurostar ticket-machines, check-in points and security 
 controls are today, before riding long, silent escalators up to the trains  
basking beneath Barlow and Ordish's glorious roof. This, the most adventurous  
and biggest roof of its kind for decades after it was built, now painted a  
fetching sky blue and flooded with daylight? This station, with its  
quarter-mile, 300kph trains, a huge cocktail bar, a branch of Foyles stocked  with 
20,000 titles, a smart Searcy's restaurant and brasserie, independent  coffee bars, 
floors covered in timber and stone rather than sticky British  airport-style 
carpet, new gothic carvings, newly cast gothic door handles, and a  
nine-metre-high sculpture of lovers meeting under the station clock? How could  anyone 
ever have thought of denying us this engineering aria, this architectural  
hymn?  
And yet, 40-plus years ago, when the idea of a Channel tunnel railway was  
little more than a half-forgotten Victorian fantasy, St Pancras station was very 
 nearly a martyr to the fundamentalist creeds of "rationalisation" (for which 
 read cost-cutting), "change" (for change's sake) and "modernisation". While, 
 today, none of us would take seriously politicians who bandy such weasel 
words  about, these were quite the thing in the 60s. Especially when it came to  
railways.  
When St Pancras was threatened with destruction in 1966, eminent  
architectural historians - including Nikolaus Pevsner and tireless  conservationists, 
notably John Betjeman - fought a vigorous campaign to shame  British Railways and 
Harold Wilson's government. Only a few years earlier,  London had lost the 
world-famous Euston Arch. This time, the conservation lobby  had developed the 
teeth of a great white shark and the grip of a bulldog. St  Pancras was listed 
Grade 1, the same status as those other great gothic national  monuments, 
Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster.  
Even then, such eminent historians as Sir John Summerson, curator of Sir John 
 Soane's Museum, refused to support the cause. St Pancras was seen as vulgar, 
 even by such critical eyes as Summerson's; here was a Victorian parvenu, a  
mongrel of a design in which Scott's faux-medieval spires failed to meet 
Barlow  and Ordish's Victorian "hi-tech" train shed with any degree of 
architectural  conviction.  
This seems odd to me, as it might to you. The Victorian engineers' roof at St 
 Pancras forms a pointed arch and has always seemed the very model of a 
modern  gothic vault, all iron and glass rather than medieval stone and marble. 
Hotel  and station seem comfortably married. What Summerson, contemporary British 
 Railways executives and so many politicians in the mid-60s disliked about St 
 Pancras seems to have been that it reminded them of their essentially 
Victorian  upbringing, all starch and nannies, ice-cold bedrooms, chivalrous tales 
by  Walter Scott and morning doses of cod liver oil. This generation wanted to 
be  staunchly modern.  
Today, a fully restored, boldly extended and slightly reworked St Pancras  
proves that we can have our boiled beef and our oil-drizzled fettuccine and eat  
it. Here, if anywhere, the worlds of High Victoriana and that of "brands",  
digitalia and non-stop shopping come together in a most delightful way.  
As anyone would who has loved St Pancras station since earliest childhood, I  
came here again a few days ago with a degree of trepidation. This is where I 
had  been taken to even before I went to school to see such trains as The 
Robin Hood,  the Thames-Clyde Express, The Palatine and the improbably glamorous 
Midland  Pullman pulling out past Victorian gas-holders and old goods yards.  
I had also been taken on a tour of St Pancras Chambers, as the hotel was  
known after 1935, when the guests were kicked out and replaced by British Rail  
executives. Scott's demeaned masterpiece was potted about with obscure railway  
offices lit by naked fluorescent tubes and separated by hastily knocked-up  
partition walls. I was happily haunted for many years afterwards by the spooky  
gothic stairs, halls, corridors and windows I had witnessed vanishing into a  
kind of architectural gloaming even in the middle of a bright June day. Years 
 later, when I came to read Gormenghast, my mind's eye model of Mervyn Peake'
s  frightening fictional castle was St Pancras. I'm not sure, but I think it 
might  have been his, too.  
I have to say that the business and design team put in charge of reshaping St 
 Pancras for the high-speed railway renaissance, completing its task when so 
many  of us are fed up with being treated like criminals and cattle in British 
 airports, has performed little short of a miracle here. Although the whole  
caboodle - station, five-star hotel, costly flats inside the former Midland  
Grand - will not be complete for a few years yet, this fact will have little  
effect on passengers using Eurostar services.  
Passengers using regional rail services, however, might well complain that  
because the great train shed at St Pancras is given over, lock, stock and  
corbel, to Eurostar services, they have been demoted to platforms under a new,  
flat concrete, steel and glass roof, described as a "magic carpet" by its  
architects, set at the very far end of the station and seemingly closer to  
Manchester than Euston Road. But, then, this £800m, decade-long project has  always 
been an almighty juggling act, and it would take the most curmudgeonly  
strap-hanger on the 08:16 from St Albans to St Pancras to deny the brilliance of  
what has been achieved.  
Alastair Lansley, a director of Arup, one of the four engineering companies  
that form Rail Link Engineering, the consortium charged with building the  
high-speed railway, has been the architect in charge of St Pancras for the past  
11 years. One of the last of British Railway's in-house architects, Lansley,  
together with his former colleague Nick Derbyshire, was responsible for the  
1990s redesign of Liverpool Street, another fine Victorian gothic terminus 
saved  from demolition with more than a little help from Betjeman.  
Lansley excels in matching traditional buildings with contemporary design.  
Recently, he built a house for himself and his wife in Twickenham, Middlesex.  
From the outside you would never guess that this was anything other than a  
singularly handsome and immaculately restored Regency villa. It happens to be  
brand new. Indoors, the house is impeccably modern, with bathroom fittings  
designed by none less than Norman Foster, the architect who initiated the design  
for the extension of the train shed at St Pancras that was then handed over 
to  Lansley to execute.  
"It's all been a bit of an architectural and engineering roller coaster  
ride," says Lansley. "Some of the engineers have been involved with the  
high-speed link for 18 and 19 years. This is one of those all-embracing projects  
demanding considerable planning and concentrated skill. It really has been  
finished, as they say, on time and on budget, and to a very high quality indeed.  I 
think this is something to celebrate, and we'll certainly have lots of  
champagne on ice when the Queen comes here on November 6.  
"The great thing is that all the different parties involved came to work with 
 each other remark- ably smoothly. When we wanted to get rid of the original  
platforms and install a new concrete platform for Eurostar trains under the  
Barlow-Ordish roof, English Heritage couldn't have been more gracious or  
helpful. They've drawn us up short here and there, and for the good of the  
project, but when I look back and think of what we've dared to do here, I think  the 
conservationists have been very generous."  
It was Lansley who had the audacious idea of opening up the station's  
undercroft - once used to store barrels of beer that were brought down in their  
hundreds of thousands by goods trains from Burton-on-Trent - to create a visual  
connection and passenger link between this vast basement and the newly 
restored  iron-and-glass arched roof so very high above it. This move has been the 
making  of the new station. Now, Eurostar passengers walk into the former beer 
cellar to  check in to their Paris and Brussels-bound trains. This thrilling 
space supports  the station and trains above it on a forest of iron columns. 
Daylight stream  down from the great incisions Lansley's team have made in the 
platform floor.  
Quality abounds in this extraordinary public space. Rich, scratch-proof  
timber floors here. Stone flagstones there. No carpets. No McDonald's. The very  
latest in easy-to-use information technology. All this in Britain, the land of  
tat, executive homes, chainstore mania and shopping malls.  
"I remember meetings," says Lansley, "in which we said that the retailing  
element of the design ought to be based more along the lines of [Piccadilly's  
upmarket] Burlington Arcade than those of Oxford Street. So, we've got the 
upper  end of the chains here, mixed in with independent shops and bars, and all 
of  these tamed by the architectural framework, which takes visual precedence 
over  purely commercial considerations. We've built new lime-mortared gothic 
brickwork  from a purpose-made kiln in Nottingham; we've cast new gothic door 
handles and  we've made new gothic doors for the shop fronts. So, although 
there's lots of  brand-new engineering details, railway equipment, information 
displays and so  on, the station looks all of a piece."  
This is all the more remarkable given the extremely complex nature of the  
project. Eurostar platforms and undercroft aside, works include a new concrete  
station beneath St Pancras for the Bedford to Brighton services, connecting 
the  terminus with Luton and Gatwick airports; a modernised and vastly extended  
London Underground station at King's Cross St Pancras; new regional train  
platforms for the Midland main line and future services, aboard Japanese-built  
"bullet trains", to Stratford and Kent; the restoration and extension of 
Scott's  hotel into a five-star Marriott Renaissance; the construction of a new 
gothic  wing by Richard Griffiths and RHWL architects as an extension to the 
hotel; and  flats in the upper floors of the old Midland Grand converted by the 
Manhattan  Loft Corporation.  
"One thing we're really proud of," says Lansley, "is that we kept the Midland 
 main line running pretty much every day, so commuters were as little  
inconvenienced as possible. The other thing I'm particularly pleased with is the  
fact that passengers' progress through the station, from check-in to seats on  
the trains, is seamless. Unlike Gare du Nord, you don't have to go upstairs to  
then get down to the trains. The Victorian station will be very easy to use 
as  well, I hope, as inspiring and a lot of fun."  
In its new guise, and despite the security measures necessary to keep  
Eurostar services safe, St Pancras will remain very much a public building. A  
common walkway passes through the Eurostar undercroft. Anyone will be able to  come 
here to drink at the champagne bar set alongside arriving and departing  
trains, to meet beneath the station's new statues of reunited lovers and of Sir  
John Betjeman. The station will even boast a farmers' market.  
"We wanted to make this something special, something that the rest of the  
railway network in Britain might aspire to," says Rob Holden, chief executive of 
 London and Continental Railways, the company that built and runs the British 
end  of the Channel tunnel rail link. "It's taken an enormous amount of 
long-term  planning, but I think we've got a station every bit as glamorous as New 
York's  Grand Central, with the bonus that here you can see the trains. Now 
it's time to  think about a high-speed railway from St Pancras to Birmingham, 
Manchester and  Scotland. Given the lack of engineers in Britain, the complexity 
of the  structure of the modern railway business and the ups and downs of 
long-term  investment, that'll best be built in stages. But this is a pretty good 
start."  
It is - and I think Scott, Barlow, Ordish, Pevsner and Betjeman might all  
agree. Whether you have business in Brussels, a lunch date in Paris or are  
simply keen to avoid airport hell, whether you are a railway buff, an engineer,  
curious shopper, architectural historian or a Friday-evening champagne Charlie, 
 the new-look St Pancras is very likely to suit you. Here is a gothic fairy 
tale  brought up to date, setting a new standard for Britain's railways, and 
bringing  new life to one of Europe's most compelling buildings.






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