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Restored St Pancras a dazzling monument to Victorian design
• Queen opens revamped station as Eurostar terminus
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By
Miss Biscuit, contributing editor
Monday,
12 November, 2007
On Tuesday 6th November 2007 one thousand of the great and good congratulated themselves at the marvel of Barlow's engine shed and the detailing of Gilbert Scott's great hotel, at his gargoyles of drivers and engineers, his majestic brick arches, his great ticket hall like a cathedral confessional, his towers, gables, dormers, fireplaces, swirling staircase and celestial ceiling.
They marvelled today, but once they condemned as "heritage freaks" those without whom all this would have vanished.In the terrible 1960s, the station's elegist, John Betjeman, bleakly wrote that it was simply "too beautiful and too romantic to survive". He added: "No one except you and me, dear reader, believes there can be anything beautiful about a railway station."
Betjeman was not mentioned on Tuesday, though his statue graces the concourse. Nor was there mention of the true saviour of St Pancras, the Victorian Society, which single-handedly fought not just ministers and railwaymen but self-styled aesthetes such as John Summerson, who declared the place "nauseating". Credit also goes to the then minister, Lord Kennet, who fought the transport lobby and listed the building Grade I in 1967.
There followed 40 years of wretched struggle as this supreme manifestation of Victorian gothic sat rotting on the Euston Road. It sighed, heaved, wept, flickered to life but seemed ready to gasp its last. London Docks, listed at the same time, were none the less demolished when a Labour minister, Peter Shore, wanted to help Rupert Murdoch build his Wapping plant.
As the cost of restoration soared, British Railways tried to close the station and concentrate services on adjacent King's Cross. Travellers Fare executives wandered boarded-up corridors. Camden council demanded that the only reuse be as a railwaymen's hostel. Even the heritage lobby gazed at the mighty pile and despaired.
For years the fate of St Pancras rested with one man - BR's environment director, Bernard Kaukas, who battled to win £3m from his board to prevent the collapse of the roof. His love of the place, again unsung, almost certainly saved St Pancras from demolition.
Not just a building, but a joy to behold. Ken Livingstone must hate St Pancras.
There can have been few more exquisite moments for lovers of the iron way. On Tuesday evening, St Pancras enthusiasts gathered at last for the resurrection of the life. The war had been long and bruising, but this was sweet triumph.Hand clutched to his hat, coat-tails caught by a gust of wind, John Betjeman gazes up at the magnificent arch of St Pancras station's freshly restored train shed.
Or at least does his likeness, cast in bronze by sculptor Martin Jennings and unveiled yesterday by the poet's daughter, Candida Lycett Green. From tomorrow, when Eurostar's service begins, alighting passengers will pass this image of the writer, lost in wonder at the power of William Henry Barlow's feat of engineering.
Betjeman was one of the most energetic figures who, in the 1960s, fought the destruction of St Pancras - mercifully unthinkable today, now that public taste has softened towards George Gilbert Scott's marvellously elaborate neo-Gothic station buildings and old Midland Grand Hotel. "He didn't save it singlehandedly, but it certainly wouldn't have happened without him," said Andrew Motion, one of Betjeman's successors as poet laureate.
"Louis MacNeice once called Betjeman a triumphant misfit. But the things he was regarded as eccentric for admiring during his lifetime are the things that we have learned to hold dear," he added. "What he did as a saviour of 19th-century architecture is extraordinary."
Jennings said of his sculpture: "All my choices were led by the station. What Betjeman is doing in the statue is what we all do - we look up, with an intake of breath. I have shown him as if he has walked in for the first time since the station was saved."
Jennings worked from photographs and film footage of Betjeman, and was "nudged" in the right direction by Betjeman's family, in particular Lycett Green. She said: "He has captured his sense of wonder on first walking into a great man-made space such as a cathedral ... He always looked up at the roof - and in St Pancras more than anywhere. It is, after all, the greatest station roof on earth, isn't it?"
Around the base of the statue are carved lines from Betjeman poems, chosen by Jennings, including: "Here where the cliffs alone prevail. I stand exultant, neutral, free,/ And from the cushion of the gale. Behold a huge consoling sea."
The station's rebirth is a slap in the face for the old-is-useless mob and all their claptrap about outdated structures
Simon Jenkins
Friday November 9, 2007
The Guardian
The Naked Reader 2007
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