St Pancras

Sightseeing with the wife in London and a good time to have a look at the re-vamped St Pancras Station. It really does deserve all the praise it is getting. Okay the champagne bar may be the longest in the world, but it was packed end-to-end. The roof is a marvel and the building combines its three functions – as a public space, as the new Eurostar terminal, and as a normal London railway terminus (with trains to Nottingham and Sheffield and the like) extremely well.

I'm a bit confused about St Pancras himself (there appear to have been two of them). Anyway one or other gave his name to an area of London. There was a church once but it seems to have disppeared by the fourteenth century. Ipswich has a Roman Catholic church dedicated to St Pancras and, according to Wikipedia, there is a village of St Pancras in Northern Holland.

I suppose the only let-down to St Pancras station is the tube connection. The ticket hall for the underground station may be an engineering marvel, but it isn’t big enough to cope (another ticket hall is in process of construction). And when you descend for the Victoria or Northern line there is all the bleakness of an under-funded transit system (unpainted, unclean, pipework wrapped in tinfoil endlessly waiting for someone to finish a refurbishment started many moons previously).

But I ramble on. When the redevelopment of St Pancras as the new Eurostar terminal was announced I thought the idea was bonkers. The terminus at Waterloo seemed to do the job well enough and to my eye is much closer to Paris, as well as being wonderfully convenient for central London. Appararently 84 million passengers used the now empty Waterloo platforms and I hope they get re-used sensibly. I'll eat my hat over St Pancras - it is a masterpiece of refurbishment.