The high-speed rail link from Paris to London’s newly renovated St Pancras station heralds the start of a second golden age for European train travel, so says an enamoured Kathryn Miller
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go,” wrote Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson in 1879.
“I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” He was writing these romantic sentiments during the reign of England’s Queen Victoria, an era regarded as the golden age of rail travel. He could have been talking about journeys from London’s St Pancras station, which – thanks to the arrival of Eurostar trains on its Victorian platforms – may be about to experience a second golden age.
Until last November, Eurostar services, which connect London to Paris and Brussels via the tunnel beneath the English Channel, departed from Waterloo station, in the south of the British capital. But a massive development has meant, after 13 years, trains now come and go on a new high-speed rail-link from the renovated north London station
The high-speed route reduces the journey time between London and Paris to just two hours and 15 minutes, and between London and Brussels to one hour and 51 minutes. For visitors from the Gulf, the option of flying into Paris to enjoy street cafes and boutique shopping before hopping on the train to London has become an attractive, eco-friendly (all Eurostar services are carbon neutral) European vacation or a means of transacting business in the two European capitals.
When Eurostar began operating out of Waterloo station on 14 November 1994, there were just four trains a day between London and Europe: two to Paris and two to Brussels. Now there are up to 10 daily trains between London and Brussels and up to 17 between London and Paris. Part of the service’s attraction is that passengers need only check in 30 minutes before catching the train, the service is city centre to city centre, mobiles don’t need turning off and there are no luggage weight restrictions.
In London, there has been great excitement about the restoration of St Pancras and it has been featured in a BBC television documentary series, as well as on the front cover of Time Out London, which proclaimed the renovated Gothic train shed to be the first in its round-up of the capital’s “Seven Wonders”. Work on the neglected hulk cost a whopping US$1.6 billion – a huge sum to restore a public building – but the result is a breathtaking attempt to return the site to its former glory, when it was the largest single-span train canopy in the world.
Engineer Sir William Henry Barlow’s train shed, with its glass and iron arched roof, was complemented by architect Sir George Gilbert Scott’s magnificent red-brick station, which opened in 1868, and hotel, which opened five years later, in 1873. The glory lasted only a few decades, however. The hotel boasted a luxurious interior, but its 300 rooms didn’t have en suite bathrooms and visitors chose instead to stay in fully plumbed establishments such as The Ritz. The hotel shut in 1935 and narrowly escaped demolition in the 1960s, largely thanks to a campaign led by the poet Sir John Betjeman, whose statue now adorns the revamped concourse. The station didn’t fare much better; by the 1990s, most rail services had been moved to an adjacent station, King’s Cross, leaving a grim, dilapidated shed.
Now the ironwork has been painted its original pale-blue colour, the brickwork has been repaired, using more then 16 million specially made bricks, and around 300,000 slate roof tiles were sourced from the quarry in Wales that had supplied the original tiles more than a century earlier. The glass roof – all 18,000 panes of it – is said to be self-cleaning. Rob Holden, chief executive of London and Continental Railways, the company that built the new rail link, is naturally proud of the result: “I think we’ve got a station that is every bit as glamorous as New York’s Grand Central, with the bonus that, here, you can see the trains.”
Great Britain’s Queen was also impressed. Speaking at the official opening ceremony, she praised the quality of the workmanship before adding she hoped people would “come to St Pancras not just as a station, but as a destination”. It’s the endorsement everyone who worked on the project wanted to hear. The station now features a 98-metre Champagne bar (which also sells a range of non-alcoholic cocktails, teas and canapés) along the length of platform one. Upmarket cafés and boutiques, as well as Eurostar’s ticket hall, are situated in the old “undercroft”, originally a basement storage area that Alastair Lansley, the architect overseeing the renovation, flooded with natural light by removing one of the station’s platforms.
One of the reasons for all of this activity is to regenerate the rundown area around King’s Cross, north of the city centre. It is estimated the high-speed route will result in US$21 billion of regeneration to southeast England and that the new site will draw more travellers from the north of England to Continental Europe, on a journey made all the quicker by the new high-speed tracks.
It has taken nine years to construct the 110km stretch of line that allows Eurostar trains to reach their top speed of 300kph, which they routinely achieve on the French side of the Channel.
Nor will the work stop there: plans are in place to develop the 26-hectare railway goods yard, which is owned by London and Continental Railways, into offices and new housing and there is already talk that Britain’s first high-speed rail route could be augmented by additional fast links to other major cities across the UK, such as Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
As for the former hotel, the upper floors are being transformed by the Manhattan Loft Corporation into luxury penthouse apartments – rumoured to fetch in the region of US$20 million each.
The remainder of the building is set to open as a five-star Marriott Renaissance hotel next year. When it opens, St Pancras hotel won’t simply be a glamorous place to stay in London – with its excellent transport links to Heathrow and many UK destinations, as well as to the continent, it will be convenient, too. What better way to experience a renewed golden age? www.eurostar.com |
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