Eurostar is coming to St Pancras King’s Cross station from today! STP is to Londontown what Penn Station is to NYC – fine architecture in the Age of Steam. It reminds me of watching the television series Great Railway Journeys as a child, and all the romance associated with rail travel, gargoyles and Gothic revival towers included. STP’s amazingly enormous vaulted train shed, once the largest single span roof in the world, has been repainted in the original sky blue. Simultaneously, the Midland Grand Hotel is being reopened in 2009 as the 244-room STP Renaissance hotel. I like STP because the archway shelter stone figures depict not saints, woodsprites and royals but railroad breakers and other workers in a classic way. Industrial Age ironwork melds with medieval motifs in the ornate stair case. Burly Yorkshiremen grunt about with very large wrenches to fix rail connections. You are here and you are everywhere.
Hat tip for advert visual: P
