Underwhelming St Pancras

This afternoon I had the opportunity to take a look at the new, redeveloped St Pancras station, which is now used for the Eurostar trains to Paris and Brussels (and a few other places, like Euro Disney and, curiously, Avignon). The station had previously been used only for trains to the East Midlands and Sheffield (back in the day, it was also used for trains to Luton and Bedford, which now go through Thameslink to the south coast, and you could get to Manchester too). I never found the station all that impressive; it had a really grand Victorian facade but inside, it was just like a big, empty train shed. (Believe it or not, you could get to the East Midlands from two London terminals, the other being Marylebone, from which trains ran via Aylesbury and Rugby. Marylebone is still there, but most of the line up to the Midlands was ripped up in the 1960s.)

When I got there today I expected the station to be complete. Well, St Pancras itself is, but the outside is still a building site. They are still building the luxury (natch) apartments above the station, called St Pancras Chambers, and so access to the station from the front is only through a narrow passageway past the wooden walls of the building site. Inside, the station still has the empty shed ambience that it had before. They’ve painted the metalwork light blue, and added an extension further up track, in a completely different style to the original. The station for the East Midlands, reduced to four platforms, has been shoved further up to the back of the station, so anyone who wants to use the trains has to walk quite a bit further than they did before.

There are two new statues in the station – a huge one, of a couple kissing each other goodbye, and a small one, of John Betjeman, the poet who campaigned to save St Pancras from being knocked down. I saw the champagne bar (imaginatively titled The Champagne Bar), which is supposedly the longest such bar in the world or something, but unless there is another such bar on the premises, it was really nothing special – I expected it to be platform length or something like that. It wasn’t that big and the length didn’t look remarkable. There were two separate musical performances going on on the upper floor, and anyone entering through the former main entrance and needing to get to the trains had to fight their way through the audiences. Well planned, eh?

I think Betjeman was wrong. St Pancras is an ugly building – not 1960s brutalist ugly I admit, but ugly all the same, and if it had been knocked down, it would have been no great loss.