St. Pancres Regains the Gothic Glamour

From The Times Online:

It's been an awfully long time since British rail travel has been what you'd call alluring. Sleazy, filthy, cramped - maybe. But sophisticated, romantic, with a dash of Agatha Christie, a sparkle of Trevor Howard, finished off with an eccentric sprinkle of John Betjeman? Any relationship between the words "British trains" and "glamour" is long estranged. But then there is St Pancras. I'd forgotten what it was like. As long as I've been alive the station's famously phantasmagoric architecture has been veiled, cobwebbed, caked in soot and neglect. George Gilbert Scott's gargantuan Midland Hotel out front has been derelict since I was in short trousers, haunting the Euston Road with its Gormenghast gloom and purposeless air. The hotel and the station werevictoriously snatched from British Rail's demolition ball in the 1960s with the help of that great railway enthusiast Betjeman (unlike Euston down the road), but, for decades since, that victory has turned out to be a pyrrhic one. William Barlow's shed behind the hotel, the engineering feat of its day, had become so crepuscular that walking in catapulted you back to some distant time between the age of steam and the InterCity 125. It was romantic, in a way, but more Miss Havisham than Celia Johnson, its few trains trundling off to Kettering and Leicester rather anticlimactic within a stupendous building clearly meant as the start of journeys to destinations more exotic.

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