Make a date at the destination station

If you have a long-lost Continental lover, you have a little under six months to arrange the perfect reunion under the clock at St Pancras on 14 November. That is the date when Eurostar will commence its new service along the full length of what is now called High Speed 1, the much-troubled fast link to the Channel Tunnel. Most importantly, it’s the day Eurostar trains will cease to arrive at Waterloo, and instead make their way from Ebbsfleet under the Thames and across east London to Stratford, and at last to the refurbished Victorian terminus on Euston Road. But beware that your clinch is not spoiled by the distractions of St Pancras itself: instead of staring into your eyes, your loved one may glance upwards and whisper: ‘My God, look what they’ve done to the Barlow shed….’

‘They’ are Corber, a joint venture of contractors led by Costain, and what they have done to the great ironwork span — designed by W.H Barlow, chief engineer of the Midland Railway, and opened in 1868 — is to reglaze it and restore it in perfect detail, removing 140 years of accumulated soot and grime so that natural light floods the vast space below. It will, I predict, be hailed as that rarest of modern British achievements — a civil-engineering triumph. I invited myself round last week to clamber up the scaffolding under the clock — a very handsome restored clock it is too — and find out what has made this £600 million project tick along on time and on budget, when so many others do not. Right next door, for example, is one of the great British cock-ups of all time: the British Library building that cost more than three times its original estimates by the time it opened, several years overdue, in 1998.