St Pancras railway station — railway station
Colin · CC BY-SA 3.0

St Pancras railway station

  • Elevation28 m
  • 2 min read
  • 51.530° N 0.125° W

Interesting facts

  • In 1978 British Rail tried to sell the original Dent clock, but it shattered during removal and went to a retiring guard, Roland Hoggard, for £25.
  • Hoggard pieced the broken clock together in his Nottinghamshire barn, and the original later served as the template for the replica installed in 2007.
  • Beer wagons were once lowered about 6 metres to the vaults by a hoist between platforms 4 and 5; beer storage there ended only in 1967.
  • The station was built on the site of Agar Town, a former slum.
  • The first train into the new terminus, on 1 October 1868, was an overnight mail train from Leeds.
  • On the night of 10 to 11 May 1941 a bomb fell on platform 3 and exploded in the beer vaults below, closing the station for eight days.
  • Barlow's 24-rib roof and its glazing cost over £53,000; the great iron arches were built by the Butterley Company.
  • British Rail officials nicknamed the campaigner Jane Fawcett 'the furious Mrs Fawcett' for her fight to save the building.
  • Paul Day's bronze The Meeting Place stands 9 metres tall and weighs about 20 tonnes.
  • The station takes its name from the parish of St Pancras, named after Pancras of Rome, a fourth-century boy martyr.

Why it is worth it

St Pancras is two buildings that happen to be one: a vast iron train shed and, in front of it, a red-brick Gothic hotel that looks like a cathedral. The Midland Railway built the station after its trains were stuck for months on other companies' lines into London during the 1862 exhibition. The engineer William Henry Barlow roofed the platforms with a single span of wrought-iron lattice ribs springing straight from the platform level, about 210 m long, 73 m wide and 30 m high; when it opened in 1868 it was the largest enclosed space in the world. Because the tracks had to cross the Regent's Canal, the platforms sit well above street level, and the space underneath was laid out on the grid of a Burton beer warehouse. That undercroft is now the station's shopping arcade and the Eurostar departure hall.

The frontage is the former Midland Grand Hotel by George Gilbert Scott, who won the design competition in 1865: a skyline of spires, pointed arches and polychrome brick that opened in the 1870s. It closed as a hotel in 1935 and spent decades as railway offices. By the 1960s the whole complex was earmarked for demolition, and a campaign led by the Victorian Society, Jane Fawcett and the poet John Betjeman saved it; the listing came just days before demolition was due to start. The building returned to use as a hotel in 2011.

The £800 million rebuild for High Speed 1 relaunched the station as St Pancras International in November 2007, with Eurostar trains to Paris, Brussels and, since 2018, the Netherlands running beneath Barlow's restored roof. It is worth lingering upstairs: Martin Jennings's bronze of Betjeman gazes up at the roof he fought for, Paul Day's giant bronze couple The Meeting Place stands beneath the great Dent clock at the south end, and public pianos on the concourse are played by anyone who sits down.

Getting there

St Pancras stands on Euston Road in central London, beside King's Cross station and the British Library, with King's Cross St Pancras Underground station beneath it. London City Airport (LCY) is about 13 km away; Thameslink trains from St Pancras also run directly to Gatwick Airport. The concourses are open to anyone, not just passengers.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in England 93The Most Beautiful Places in the United Kingdom 154The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Buildings in the United Kingdom 5The Most Beautiful Buildings Seen on Screen in the United Kingdom 11The Most Beautiful Railway Stations 22The Most Beautiful Buildings in England 27The Most Beautiful Film Locations in England 27The Most Beautiful Buildings in the United Kingdom 28The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Buildings 28The Most Beautiful Film Locations in the United Kingdom 29The Most Beautiful Buildings Seen on Screen 47The Most Beautiful Film Locations 221The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

St Pancras International is a major central London railway terminus on Euston Road in the London Borough of Camden. It is the terminus for Eurostar services between the United Kingdom and Belgium, France and the Netherlands. It provides East Midlands Railway services to Leicester, Corby, Derby, Sheffield, Luton Airport Parkway, and Nottingham on the Midland Main Line, Southeastern high-speed trains to Kent via Ebbsfleet International and Ashford International, and Thameslink cross-London services to Bedford, Cambridge, Peterborough, Brighton, Horsham and Gatwick Airport. It stands between the British Library, the Regent's Canal and London King's Cross railway station. Beneath both main line stations is King's Cross St Pancras tube station on the London Underground; combined, they form one of the country's largest and busiest transport hubs.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

51.53000, -0.12528per Wikidata