These days the most conspicuous presence on the gritty streets of King’s Cross is not call girls and crack dealers but buttercup-yellow huddles of hard hats. Through the clouds of cement dust you can just about make out signs explaining that the hat-wearers are ‘considerate constructors’, motto: ‘Improving the image of construction’. This attempt at what psychiatrists like to call ‘impression-management’ has echoes in the project on which the men are engaged — to liberate the area from its sordid past and transform it from a place where people don’t linger if they can help it into somewhere they choose to settle.
The industrial age turned semi-rural King’s Cross into a tangle of squalid slums presided over by the imposing twin presence of Gothic-revival St Pancras and King’s Cross, its more balanced and functional neighbour. Many were driven from their homes to make way for the stations, and the area became a place for goods, not people.
Previous high-profile attempts to put the people back into King’s Cross, such as Stuart Lipton and Godfrey Bradman’s £3.5 billion development proposal in the 1980s, fell spectacularly by the wayside. This time, though, the catalyst for change is the St Pancras Channel Tunnel Rail Link, which is well under way and due for completion in 2007. After five years of consensus-building consultation, the developer Argent (King’s Cross) Ltd submitted final plans at the end of September for King’s Cross Central, which would turn the soulless 67-acre wasteland to the north of the stations into ‘a dense, vibrant and distinctive urban quarter’.
The 15-year-long, £2 billion scheme envisages 1,900 new homes, with at least 40 per cent affordable housing, and about seven million sq ft of offices and shops, as well as plentiful open spaces (green spaces, ice rinks, public-art-filled squares) and community facilities. Conservation-led, it would involve restoring 20 historic buildings, including four listed gas holders.
All this is unfolding under the civic-minded and environmentally aware gaze of the fortysomething Argent chief executive, Roger Madelin. But well intentioned though the scheme undoubtedly is, there are fears that it might exorcise the area’s ballsy spirit and create a bland, sanitised anywhere-ville, a magnet for the inevitable stampede of chains spearheaded by the likes of All Bar One and Wetherspoons. Mindful of this pitfall, Madelin says, ‘While we want the new area to be clean and safe, it has to keep its edge. There has to be some anarchy and I am the champion of anarchy on this project.’ Watch this space.
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