ST PANCRAS 
A FIVE STAR STATION

 

Champagne, art, a direct line to Paris
and a multi-million pound revamp puts
St Pancras on a different style platform.

 

By Nancy V Richards

 

‘Oh gee I gotta crick in my neck from lookin’ at that thing’ – she wasn’t wrong, a little grey haired lady audibly from America, was bent backwards like an inverted banana trying to take in the full length of The Meeting Place, the nine metre cast-bronze colossus of two embracing lovers that stands at the end of the Eurostar Concourse at St Pancras station making people either very happy or very cross. You love it or you hate it. If you can see it. I was with the old lady. 

 

It’s really quite hard to get a good look at it unless you stand far enough away – in fact about as far away as the other statue, the one of Sir John Betjeman – late poet laureate who was a champion of St Pancras. And there are a few differing opinions about this one too, like for instance why so small compared to the other one that has been criticised by some Brits as being ‘kitsch, nasty, naff, romantic stereotyping, hideous, clumsy, a ‘brown’ elephant, an embarrassment’ and ‘if it were music it would be the equivalent of the Mr Blobby Song’. Others have called it ‘touching, meaningful and evocative.’ 

 

Amazing really how exercised people can get about a piece of public sculpture – in this case one that took over a year to complete, cost around one million pounds and weighs 20 tons. Artist Paul Day says of it simply, ‘Contemporary art is fairly incomprehensible to the man in the street, so I wanted to do something accessible yet striking.’ It’s certainly striking.

A windblown Betjeman gazing up to the infinite  ‘ridge and furrow’ domed glass and iron girder roof – and in an engraved circle of slate around him are his own words:

‘And in the shadowless unclouded glare / Deep blue above us fades to whiteness / Where a misty sea-line meets the wash of air’.

 

But St Pancras, the station and its Chambers, is no stranger to winding up the locals. When it was built back in 1868, the train shed, designed by William Barlow, became the largest enclosed space in the world. The red brick Gothic facade of the Chambers, created by the winner of a competition, became the face of the iconic Midland Great Hotel which took eight years to build.  But eventually, despite its grand Victorian architecture, in 1935 the hotel closed down and became railway offices, the station itself was a victim of the WWII Blitz and by the mid eighties even British Rail had vacated leaving the previously fashionable building to the mercy of weather, decay and nesting pigeons.

 

As has been proven again and again, the most degrading thing you can do to any institution is to amalgamate it, so when in the sixties there was talk of flattening St Pancras, grand old lady of the railway era, and merging her with King’s Cross, a public outcry broke out led by the huffing and puffing Sir John. But the poet and his supporters won the day and a decade later, just ten days before demolition due date, the government gave it a Grade 1 listing as an historical building. Reprieve! Hence the statue, by Martin Jennings, of a windblown Betjeman gazing up to the infinite  ‘ridge and furrow’ domed glass and iron girder roof – and in an engraved circle of slate around him are his own words: ‘And in the shadowless unclouded glare / Deep blue above us fades to whiteness / Where a misty sea-line meets the wash of air’. 

 

So that explains Betjeman’s presence, and the presence of the Betjeman Arms pub. But why the brown colossus? Well given the history of the place as a wartime departure point for troops and evacuating children, with all the fond farewells and passionate reunitings it has seen, the brief from clients London and Continental Railways to artist Paul Day was to create ’something that reflects the romance that train travel used to have’. So, there they are, two vast lovers, lost to their moment under the giant railway clock that Day saw as symbolic of the moon. Crick in the neck or a lift to the heart? You decide.

 

 

But where real-life lovers are far more likely to be meeting – in fact, a row of double banquets, some of them with heated seats, are designed to encourage just that - is the stations sparkling new Champagne Bar. At ninety metres it runs alongside Eurostar Track Five and is said to be the longest in Europe (it’s been measured in shoulder to shoulder champagne flutes). There was a film crew in action when I was there, with one of those huge squirrel-like pole microphones and some performing yuppies on bar stools with pandering waiters in grey tweed hacking jackets and leather gloves, so I snuck away for fear of looking like an autograph hunter and anyway, how uncool to be sitting sipping champagne alone in arguably one of the most romantic destinations in London.

 

I opted to settle at Le Pain Quotodien (The Daily Bread) for some reflection on timetables and hot chocolate. It arrived, French style in a ceramic bowl with a spoon and a swirl of cream. This was certainly as close as I was going to get to Paris today. Though the conversations in the air were pretty transporting. Behind me a job interview was happening between an archetypal middle-management Essex blonde and a slick  haired monsieur who’d obviously just swung over par train for the occasion. 

 

At the table next door, a couple with thick Scottish accents and smart luggage agreed that this ‘wurr mooch betta than Garrr doo Noowerr’. The waiter with the chocolat was divinely foreign, though from where exactly who knows. But finally I got the absolute continental drift, en route back to the Tube where a large notice at the entrance reads ‘Bienvenue a London Underground.’ Zut alors!

 

© 2009 Nancy V. Richards
Journalist, Print and Radio to contact  021-685-3265 / 083-431-9986 / nancyrichards@intekom.co.za