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Sir John Betjemen - the poet laureate fought to save St Pancras |
You say goodbye, and I say hello
SCULPTORS in morning suits, businessmen in envy, architects in raptures: the biggest development in Camden showed a rare flash of its grandeur at a reception held at King’s Cross last week.
Before Thursday’s performance of All Our Hellos and Goodbyes, the German Gymnasium’s homage to Sir John Betjeman’s crusade to save the Victorian glories of St Pancras, figurative sculptor Paul Day captured the evening’s spirit in crisp pearl waistcoat and goatee beard.
Charged with sculpting the station’s central piece – a 30ft bronze of an embracing couple, modelled on himself and his wife – Day has much to thank Betjeman for, since without his intervention the vaulting space of the St Pancras trainshed would have been lost to the bulldozers of British Rail in 1967.
His own appearance was less a tribute to William Henry Barlow and Gilbert Scott, Victorian architects of the station, than to his day at Ascot, itself perhaps a trapping of the success the 39-year-old has enjoyed since creating the £1.65m Battle of Britain memorial on Embankment.
The new work, The Meeting Place, will stand under the station clock in the main concourse and reflect, according to Day, the timelessness of the station as a venue for partings and rendezvous – a theme applauded by Betjeman’s daughter, Candida Lycett-Green, who also came to see the one-act play commissioned by St Pancras’s current owners, London Continental Railways, also the grateful heirs of Betjeman’s conservationism.
She said: “My father would be thrilled at what they have done. He almost single-handedly stopped St Pancras being pulled down. British Rail wanted to be thought modern, but he would not allow them. He never really got over losing the Euston Arch.”
The architect in charge of the conversion project, Alastair Lansley, acknowledged his duty to preserve the 1868 structure while building out the expansion from 8 to 13 platforms. “It is all about light,” he said, stressing that the arches were being repainted their original sky-blue while the restored glass ceilings would allow the roof to be seen as intended for the first time in decades.
Nobody mentioned the protests outside – by houseboat owners given notice from Goodsway Moorings, who London Continental Railways say will have the chance of a mooring when the final King’s Cross development is complete. |
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