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Did you know?
George Gilbert Scott Jnr, the son of architect Sir Gilbert Scott who designed the Gothic Midland Grand Hotel, died an ignominious death in one of the rooms of the same hotel in 1897. He died divorced and insane following a drunken reverie in Paris, visited on his deathbed by a stream of estranged children and relatives, climbing the winding wrought iron staircase to pay their respects.
The pillars of Barlow’s undercroft are spaced exactly the width of three beer barrels apart, to maximise the storage of ales brought down from Burton-on-Trent by the Midland Railway. All of the measurements on the floor are calibrated according to that of a beer barrel.
8,000 graves have been dug up in the bid to bring the railways to
St Pancras over the years. The bodies of the famous clown Joseph Grimaldi and the Archbishop of Narbonne, complete with his porcelain false teeth, were among those exhumed, many under the watchful supervision of the young author Thomas Hardy.
The Eurostar TGV trains (an acronym for “train a grande vitesse” – high speed train) can reach record-breaking speeds of up to 357 miles per hour, though they do not travel more than 200 miles per hour in commercial use, in case you were concerned.
The poet Percy Shelley lived with Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote Frankenstein, in Church Row, which was demolished to make way for the Midland Railway Station in 1866.
The 800 iron girders which support Barlow’s train shed were “marinated” in horse urine, as the Victorians believed this made them stronger.
ST PANCRAS BY NUMBERS
• £800 million price tag for refurbishment of station
• 16 million new ‘original’ bricks
• 900,000 litres of special lime-based cement to complement the orange glow of the bricks
• 190,000 miles of cable fitted in what will be the most technologically advanced station in the world
• 300,000 Welsh slate tiles to match the hue of the original tiles
• 18 layers of paint scraped off to discover the original colour
• 20,000 litres of specially mixed paint to match the roof’s 1860 sky blue colour
• 18,000 panes of self-cleaning glass fitted into the Victorian roof
• 8,000 jobs created during construction
• 15 million man hours to restore and build the new station
• 7,000 bodies exhumed from St Pancras old churchyard
• 1,000 bottles of champagne on ice for the opening by the Queen on November 6
• 314 ft long champagne bar – the longest in Europe
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