It would take a heart of stone to contemplate St Pancras station and its appended Midland Grand Hotel without laughing, such is the brio, the swagger, the sheer in-your-faceness of its high Victorian Gothic. Yet it has not always been so appreciated. In the 1950s the distinguished architectural historian Sir John Summerson confided to Sir John Betjeman that he found the design both ‘nauseating’ and unworthy of governmental heritage protection (it was listed anyway, in 1967).
The building was in its pomp for a relatively short time; its life as a shabby office or a shuttered, gloomy no-go area lasted much longer. From 2007, however, Eurostar will be making its home at St Pancras, in the magnificent Victorian train-shed designed by William Henry Barlow, the Midland Railway’s Consulting Engineer. The stripped-down aesthetic of the train-shed has for much of the 20th century been what modernists have admired, but now contemporary taste has also learned to love the frontage of St Pancras, ‘on so vast a scale as to rule its neighbourhood instead of being governed by it’.
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