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).
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