Re: (rshsdepot) St. Pancras Station, London, UK

[Ivan Berger <oldmaven_@_comcast.net>]

I once spent a day in London just photographic railway stations. Did St 
Pancras, Kings Cross, and one other ('twasn't Waterloo).  Don't know if 
the pix are still extant, as I've moved a bit and had a basement flood a 
while back.

- -i

I95BERNIEW_@_aol.com wrote:
> >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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