Beautiful Victorian behemoth

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’.

For Simon Bradley, editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides and grandson and great-grandson of engine-men, St Pancras is clearly very close to his heart, and his enthusiasm, his eye for both overarching plans and minute detail, gives him exactly the right focus for this Victorian behemoth, which miraculously encompasses the bulk of the great cloth halls of the Low Countries, the tracery and windows of 13th-century English and French churches, and the building materials of northern Italy in one harmonious whole.

Bradley begins with the indefatigable George Gilbert Scott: from his first project when he was 22 to his death, aged only 67, Scott may have been responsible for nearly 1,000 projects.