The new St Pancras

The Guardian has published a very long piece about the new St Pancras station. Too long for the web, really, and flowery enough to leave you wondering why it wasn’t cut down before being posted online.

Writer Jonathan Glancey is bowled over by it. And so he should be. I’ve been in there myself since the renovation – admittedly not onto the Eurostar platforms – and it’s an impressive piece of re-engineering for a station that was almost demolished in 1966 because planers considered it an ‘eyesore’. Fortunately it’s now Grade 1 listed, like Westminster Abbey and so largely safe from the workman’s club hammer.

Glancey writes:

It is hard to believe that all this might not have existed, as you walk into St Pancras today through brand new gothic doors and enter the station’s previously unseen undercroft, the former storage basement with its 800 Victorian iron pillars, where the Eurostar ticket-machines, check-in points and security controls are today, before riding long, silent escalators up to the trains basking beneath Barlow and Ordish’s glorious roof. This, the most adventurous and biggest roof of its kind for decades after it was built, now painted a fetching sky blue and flooded with daylight? This station, with its quarter-mile, 300kph trains, a huge cocktail bar, a branch of Foyles stocked with 20,000 titles, a smart Searcy’s restaurant and brasserie, independent coffee bars, floors covered in timber and stone rather than sticky British airport-style carpet, new gothic carvings, newly cast gothic door handles, and a nine-metre-high sculpture of lovers meeting under the station clock? How could anyone ever have thought of denying us this engineering aria, this architectural hymn?

Yes, flowery.

Much of what he says in his 2,699 words is neatly summarised elsewhere on the Guardian site in a neat gallery of 17 pictures of St Pancras through the ages, here.

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