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Sense and sensibility
St Pancras station, in both the pinnacled stylings of Gilbert Scott’s frontage and the engineering brilliance of William Barlow’s train shed, captures the very essence of mid-Victorian power – the technological prowess, economic largess and romantic effrontery of the age are all in evidence
WE are of the time of chivalry, and we are of the age of steam,” declared the novelist WM Thackeray, a contemporary of St Pancras station. His brave, industrious words share a sensibility with the structure.
And yet as much as it exemplifies, St Pancras also confounds. Many agree the station’s winning grace is the creative tension between the two different personas on display. On the one hand, Barlow’s functional, arching genius: on the other, Scott’s Gothic extravagance.
“It brings all these things together like no other building in Britain,” marvels the historian Simon Bradley. “It still catches the eye and thrills the imagination of the explorer of London.”
George Gilbert Scott’s intention was never to blend subtly into the background of King’s Cross. He wanted his building “on so vast a scale as to rule its neighbourhood, instead of being governed by it”.
To this end he set about creating a cathedral for the railway age, built of red Mansfield sandstone and white Ancaster and Ketton stones, adorned with pointed-arched openings, spiky pinnacles and steepling roofs.
Spires, arches, corbels and crockets were borrowed admiringly from his neighbours on the continent; his German Gothic influences stoked by a competition he had won to rebuild the enormous Nikolaikirche (Church of St Nicholas) in Hamburg.
The prolific architect – who between 1833 and his death in 1878 is estimated to have designed up to 1,000 projects, including churches, hospitals, university buildings and ministerial headquarters – was not interested simply in designing a hotel, even one with the proposed opulence of the Midland Grand.
He wanted to make a building “too good for its purpose”, not just a magnificent commercial destination but a statement of intent and revolution.
Some questioned his adherence to the out-moded Gothic style, but for Scott the Gothic revival was “not a mere fashion” or “popular caprice”, it was a “deep-seated, earnest, and energetic revolution of the human mind.”
Progress in architecture, according to the Gothicists, depended on the freedom of functional expression and Scott followed this adage religiously. The size and shape of windows varies according to the importance of the rooms, their placing is irregular. Unusually expressive carvings of medieval heads, some by Scott’s own hands, discourse with birds and beasts in the stone. There are no “sham” stucco imitations of carved stone. He employed Minton tiles, each one quite different to its brother, and “grippers and tuckers” of red Leicester brick, baked especially for the job by Mr Gripper of Nottingham.
William Henry Barlow, by contrast, had very different ends and means. Simon Bradley, in his recent and peerless book on St Pancras Station, notes: “For Scott the highest endeavour was the adaptation and development of historical styles within the limitations supplied by the client. For the engineer a problem may be stated simply, then solved step by step within the technology and budget available. All being well, aesthetics will take care of themselves.”
Aesthetics were an afterthought to the engineer Barlow, as we know through his own account of the project delivered to the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1870. The old, rich Midland Railway did not have a station in London, so when it decided to build one, it wanted its presence to be as grand as possible.
Barlow, Midland Railway’s consulting engineer and a pupil of George Stephenson, was commissioned to supply a sheltered enclosure of the maximum width available from the site, allowing for a railway tunnel underneath and the streets on either side.
He and his engineering partner Rowland Mason Ordish – who had worked together with Joseph Paxton on the design of Crystal Palace, brought the line into platforms 18 feet above street level using iron columns, each hardened by “marinating” them in horse urine and capable of withstanding 55 tonnes. Over the top, as the coup de grace, arched a single-span roof 74.8 metres (243ft) across – the widest single-span structure the world had yet seen. Its steel arches rose 105 feet above the platforms and measured 690 feet in length.
Barlow’s first intention for the area underneath the elevated platforms was to fill it with the soil dug out of the tunnel, but it was shrewdly suggested that the space might be turned to better account as a storage cellar for the railway’s own goods traffic: most importantly, beer.
The cool, roomy undercroft was the ideal home for the fine ales brought from Burton on Trent to quench the thirst of Londoners at a time when a pint of beer was a safer bet than a pint of water.
Dispensing with the traditional Victorian structural system, the gap between the columns was specified to be exactly three barrels apart. In Barlow’s words, “the length of a beer barrel became the unit of measure upon which all the arrangements of this floor were based”.
Nearly 150 years down the line it seems the principles that confirmed St Pancras’s iconic status still hold, albeit in a different context. Work on the remodelling of the station has been laborious, the architect in charge of St Pancras, Alastair Lansley, tells me. Converting a Grade I listed building into a modern transport hub was not done in a day but, echoing Barlow’s invention through necessity, he proclaims: “I think the more constraints you have, the better the architecture.”
Mr Lansley is a director of Arup, one of the four engineering companies underneath the Rail Link Engineering umbrella, the consortium responsible for building the high-speed railway. For the past 11 years he has been the architect in charge of Barlow’s train shed (Scott’s hotel will have a whole new set of challenges over the next few years, but that will be a headache for the Manhattan Loft company, not Lansley), overseeing a renovation that must be practical and sensitive at the same time.
Vast oak doors have been constructed for the entrances, their brasswork copied from the original drawing book under the watchful eye of English Heritage.
The west side wall of the concourse was rebuilt further back, brick for identical brick. In fact, 16 million new “original” bricks were made in special kilns, with 900,000 litres of special lime-based cement mixed to complement the orange glow of the bricks.
Layer upon layer of paint – 18 in total – was scrapped off the iron girders of the single-span roof to reveal its original colour, before it was repainted the 1860 sky blue colour. A further 18,000 panes of self-cleaning glass and 300,000 Welsh slate tiles were fitted into the Victorian roof, and the original Victorian glazing pattern restored.
Regional rail services were shifted to platforms under the “magic carpet” – as described by its architects – a new steel and glass roof built for the purpose, while the train shed also got a discrete extension to accommodate the length of the Eurostar trains.
“A true conservation project wouldn’t have changed anything,” admits Mr Lansley. “But English Heritage and the Camden Planning Office were incredibly brave and amazingly pragmatic. They understood it had to function as a station. And we did extensive research – you have to know your building inside and out or you should leave it alone.”
Mr Lansley and his team’s boldest move was to open up the station’s undercroft to the trains, roof and sky above. Passengers walk into the former beer cellar, now the check-in hall for trains to Brussels and Paris, to be greeted by great chasms of light streaming in through four enormous incisions in the platform floor.
“It was difficult when we started,” agrees Stephen Jordan, managing director of LCR’s stations and property division.
“Here we are with a Grade I listed building and everyone was a bit nervous about what we were going to do with it. We had to look at how we could do things creatively with the building whilst respecting its integrity.”
Both men attribute a large portion of the restoration’s success to the robustness of the original building. “It still supports trains as heavy as the Eurostar and three direct hits in the two world wars couldn’t bring Barlow’s roof down,” Mr Jordan points out.
Mr Lansley is similarly impressed: “Most people see listed buildings as an absolute millstone, but I think this should be reassessed.
“My impression of St Pancras is not Gothic but extremely high tech. I don’t like to refer to it as Victorian. It is not a heavy-bolted structure.
“It is clever and beautifully dramatic. Barlow’s ties [fixing joins] are not working as hard as most. We reinforced them with concrete ties, and replaced the timber parts of the original structure with aluminium, making it durable for another 150 years, but we almost didn’t have to, they were so strong.”
Mr Lansley has spent his entire professional career designing railway buildings. Ashford International and Liverpool Street (one of the only extant models for the new St Pancras) both bear his mark.
“They are the last remaining vestiges of true public space,” he attests. “The ‘Gherkin’ is impressive, but you’d have to be invited in to see it. This is something for everyone.”
In the 1960s he walked the streets in the public marches to save St Pancras, unaware he would be responsible for restoring it to health again. He believes the construction carried out at St Pancras has “raised the bar on public work”.
“And that is for all lines,” he says, “not just the Eurostar. No railway company will appear as if it were a poor relation.”
Mr Jordan continues, now echoing Scott’s revolutionary tone: “Airports are no longer the latest things in travel. We’ve moved beyond that now and we’ve gone back to the grand station, the big space, the feeling of being able to see your form of transport, which is important.”
The retail possibilities, “restrained” beneath the level of the trains, consist of 67 shops, restaurants and a farmers’ market. There is a branch of Foyles stocked with 20,000 titles, a Searcy’s restaurant and brasserie, a 314ft long champagne bar – the longest in Europe – and the station will even have its own vicar.
In total, the refurbishment will have taken 15 million man hours to complete, at a cost of £800 million.
Mr Lansley is a man in love. “I personally think nobody will want to go home,” he says proudly. “Goethe said that architecture is ‘frozen music’. I think St Pancras is a crescendo. When it was built 139 years ago it was described as a wonder of the modern age. I think on the 14th of November it could be the eighth wonder of the world.”
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