While killing time during the Steam underground filming, I took these shots of three London terminal railway stations. Firstly St Pancras. Dear old Sir John Betjeman, or should it be Saint John, keeping watch over the station. He headed the Victorian Society's fight to save it from demolition in the late 1960s. He described the station as "Too beautiful to survive" It nearly didn't, with just ten days to spare when the fight was won. The 60s were mainly desolate years for architecture and anything Victorian was seen as hideously out of date...The public outcry at the butchering of the Euston Arch just up the road in 1961 saw a turn in attitudes to architectural preservation. That grand Doric entrance to Euston station built in 1838 and the first major railway building in London was lost..An offer was even made to move it to a more suitable location at no cost to the railways, but no, British Railways insisted it was demolished...60% of the stones now sit at the bottom the Lee river in East London, plugging a hole...There are plans to remove them and rebuild the arch back on Euston Road once again as part of the High Speed Two redevelopment of Euston Station.
Now home to Eurostar, St Pancras sees services to Paris and Brussels with new services to Amsterdam and the South of France coming in the next couple of years..The German Railways (DB) will also arrive with services to Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Cologne.....
Next door is King's Cross where we can see progress in the dismantling of the 1970s concourse on the front, by the Autumn this year a new public space will have been created. The engraved stone plaque marking the opening of the new western concourse was made from an old worn step recovered in the renovation works. It was barley installed before the Transport Secretary who opened it was "reshuffled"! Paddington was filmed on the 9th and we see the recently restored "Forth Span" dating from 1916 when Brunel's original station was enlarged. It had spent 15 years or so almost derelict above a crash deck, out of sight and under the threat of demolition for an office development project. Thankfully the plans were changed and the roof was restored.. Then it's back to King's Cross for the departure of the 18.23 Grand Central service to Sunderland and the18.30 East Coast service to Edinburgh.
31 янв 2013
