St Pancras
The George George Gilbert Scott masterpiece, is a reminder of Victorian self-confidence and dynamism. But the building also looks forward, encouraging optimism for a new golden age of railways and a celebration of British craftsmanship and endeavour.
The story of what began as the Grand Midland Hotel is a journey through the ups and downs of 150 years of British history, beginning amid the clanging social turmoil of the industrial revolution. Rapidly expanding English towns and cities were competing with each other for dominance as the railways transformed the economic landscape.
In 1863 the Midland Railway company was granted Royal Assent to build its own line and terminus in London and purchased land at St Pancras, bang next door to its arch-rivals, Great Northern Railway's station at Kings Cross. Construction required the demolition of many houses; the working-class inhabitants expelled without compensation and forced to settle in nearby slums. The necessary excavation of a local graveyard added to the misery - the building site became amassed with open coffins and bones, workers surrounded by decomposing bodies.
It was a shocking episode by today's standards, but the investment promised a neglected and squalid corner of the capital would emerge regenerated. The men from the Midlands saw this as the opportunity to promote their region and rub some of its success in the noses of their rivals. In May 1865, the railway company launched a competition for a 150-bed hotel to be built within sight of GNR's Great Northern Hotel.
George Gilbert Scott, an architect better known for his ecclesiastical works, submitted a design that must have seen jaws drop: a quite staggering vision of neo-Gothic extravagance that blew the minds and original budget of the Midland railwaymen. It was an audacious submission, but Scott knew how to play to the conceit of his paymasters. He promised that the station would eclipse every other terminus in the city and would stand as a monumental advertisement for the enterprise and industry of their region. The red bricks, the signature material in his new creation, would be manufactured in the Midlands.
As the hotel's own history relates: "It was too much for the Midland to resist. The railwaymen took a deep breath, dug deep into their pockets and gave Scott's vision the 'clear' signal."
The Gothic revivalism presents something of a paradox: the building was the product of industrial wealth but its architecture was a reaction against machine production and industrialisation. Scott was celebrating medieval craftsmanship with an architectural style also infused with Christian conservative values. For five years, builders, stonemasons, carpenters and artists laboured to bring his design to life; the result a station that became known, fittingly, as "the cathedral of railways".
The building included many innovative features; hydraulic "ascending chambers", electric bells, flush-toilets, Britain's first revolving door and a concrete fire-proof structure. Midland Grand won a reputation as an excellent upmarket hotel St Pancras was, in many ways, the apotheosis of the golden age of steam travel, a time when engineers were superstars and every town or city worth its name boasted a station and at least one railway hotel to welcome tourists and businessmen. The Midland's wagons shifted coal from the rich Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire seams, transmitting industrial power throughout the United Kingdom and across an empire. Their passenger services, meanwhile, promised romance and luxury.
Unable to install the necessary plumbing, the hotel tried to woo guests with a Moroccan coffee house and an in-house orchestra. But it wasn't enough and in 1935 the owners accepted the inevitable and closed its doors. After surviving the war relatively intact, the building was used as offices by the nationalised British Rail, dreary state austerity clashing with the opulence and faded grandeur of Scott's vision. Much of the original stencilling and paintwork was simply whitewashed over and the stone pillars boarded up. In the 1960s city planners ridiculed the hotel as indulgent, outdated and an obstacle to efficient development. There were moves to tear it down and replace it with brutalist office buildings. Enter Sir John Betjeman.
As a founder member of the Victorian Society with architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, Betjeman mobilised a popular campaign against the demolition plans and, despite his fear that St Pancras was "too beautiful and too romantic to survive", managed to secure Grade 1 listing for the building in 1967. Now, 138 years since it first opened its doors, the Midland Grand is reborn as the St Pancras Renaissance, Scott's vision painstakingly and meticulously restored. The £150m renovation transports us back to an age when English railwaymen commissioned a staircase that takes the breath away, sweeping past marble pillars and golden fleur-de-lis decorated walls to a painted ceiling adorned with the Seven Virtues - wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope and charity.
