150 years of St Pancras Station

St. Pancras station on the morning of its 150th birthday, 1st October, 2018.

Today is the 150th anniversary of the opening of St. Pancras station in London.  The Midland Railway began services from its new terminus on the 1st October 1868, having constructed an edifice fit to beckon travellers to the Kingdom of Heaven, never mind Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, or Sheffield (and eventually Manchester and Scotland).  No expense had been spared in the effort to blow King’s Cross next door, and their rivals the Great Northern Railway, out of the water.  George Gilbert Scott was the architect of the Midland Hotel, which forms the station’s façade onto the Euston Road, and William Barlow’s cast-iron overall train-shed roof contained the ‘widest and largest undivided space’ enclosed by any structure in the world at the time of its completion.

St. Pancras station from Midland Road, September 2018.

It has occurred to me recently how unfortunate it was that the Gothic Revival coincided so squarely with the Industrial Revolution.  For no sooner than these great buildings were finished than they were exposed to the grime and acidic rain of the cities they had been meant to dignify.   The arches and spires that should have soared luminously and goldenly skywards, just as they would have done in the Middle Ages, were gradually blackened and darkened by Victorian dust and soot until, a century later, they had been transformed into the world-weary hulks so detested by modernist architects.  Yet, of course, the Gothic revival had been meant largely as a romantic answer to the Industrial Revolution.  So perhaps it is simply a tale of noble defeat in its battle against utilitarian commercial enterprise.

Or was it?  For there were those like John Betjeman, Jane Fawcett, Bernard Kaukas and others who, when public affection for Victorian architecture was at its lowest ebb, saw through the grime to the glory beneath.  Now, thank goodness, most of the building has been restored to its original splendour.

Exactly the same anniversary is celebrated today by the Peckham Rye – Sutton line in south London, which the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway opened also on October 1st, 1868.  East Dulwich, North Dulwich, Tulse Hill, Streatham, Mitcham Junction, Hackbridge and Carshalton stations also celebrate their 150th birthdays today.  This line, which is probably too ordinary to be called quirky but still not straightforward enough to be wholly dull, diverges just west of Peckham Rye from the South London line that originates at London Bridge, burrows in a cutting through Dulwich, is carried aloft across a valley of surprising green, climbs through a tunnel to Tulse Hill, descends to Streatham, crosses the Wandle plain, and works its way uphill again through Carshalton to join the older line from West Croydon at Sutton, all the time undulating and curving this way and that, threading its way through existing routes.  It is a railway that fills in missing links, is not always altogether clear where it is heading, and merrily duplicates other lines.  It is still generally used only in sections, rather than from end to end as a through route, except in weekday peak hours.

There must have been a sense in 1868 that the main task of building Britain’s railways was accomplished, and that only the finishing touches were needed.  It is true that the Severn estuary and the Firth of Forth had not yet been conquered, but it must have seemed that there was not much left for the insatiable builders to achieve.  Barely forty years after the railway age had begun, the engineer’s task was nearly a matter either of crowning the railways with glory (it must have been hard to imagine what could surpass St. Pancras station) or of filling in any last gaps in the suburbs and the countryside to eliminate any doubt about the system’s comprehensiveness.

Update:

It will have been someone’s onerous duty to polish off this enormous cake!