Restaurants | 8 December 2007

The new champagne bar at St Pancras Station — sorry, St Pancras International — is said to be the longest in Europe, which is fine, although I pity the poor person — a workie, probably, they get all the duff jobs, if they get any jobs at all — who had to find this out. ‘Hello, this is England calling. Can you tell me how long your champagne bar is, please?’ Perhaps it even aimed to be the longest champagne bar in the world but the workie quit after Europe, saying, ‘Forget it. Don’t you realise work-experience kids are only meant to fool around on the internet while everyone in the office ignores them?’ But then, I suppose, if these young people didn’t have to work at the experience of being ignored, it wouldn’t be work experience, would it?

Anyway, although I am probably architecturally illiterate — a building is a building is a building to me, pretty much — I have always had quite a soft spot for St Pancras; all that Victorian, red-brick gothic splendour, parked up on the Euston Road looking so sad and faded and unloved. That, I used to think, is a building which looks as if it needed a good scrub-up and hug. Actually, I didn’t ever think that, because I try not to think a lot (it is so very tiring) but I do think it is what I would have thought, had I been more into thinking. Whatever, I am glad it has finally received that scrub-up and hug and what a scrub-up and hug it is. At a cost of £800 million, the station has been restored, reworked, boldly extended and all beneath the most glorious roof of soaring, single-span iron and glass. In fact, as even I can tell it’s magnificent, it must be.