King’s Cross Stories.

St Pancras, Midland Road exit. © Tim Marshall.

Andrew Martin, Notes From The Railways, The Independent, Aug 31 2006:

If, like me, you cycle through King’s Cross most days, the description of Staggs’s Gardens in ‘Dombey and Son’ will seem familiar: ‘…bridges that lead nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations…’

When you remember that a Stag was a railway speculator, that Staggs’s Gardens is supposed to be in Camden, the whole scene is a remarkable prefiguring of the bringing of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link into St Pancras and the associated works, such as the transformation of the streets east of King’s Cross into ‘Regent Quarter’ (which is somehow ten times more irritating as a name than ‘Regent’s Quarter’ would have been) and the development of the old goods yards north of King’s Cross.

Corner of York Way.  © Tim Marshall

The developers contend that ‘no one can be nostalgic for the old King’s Cross.’ Well, that depends what you mean by ‘old’. There was so much shilly-shallying over whether King’s Cross or St Pancras should receive the CTRL that the area has been blighted for at least twenty years. (And many locals, incidentally, still wonder why Eurostar is coming into North London at all, given that South London is closer to France, and that the Waterloo terminus seems to be doing perfectly well). Immediately before the blight, the area was, according to Albert Beale of Houseman’s book shop on Caledonian  Road, ‘pleasantly seedy’, as opposed to the heart of darkness, which it became.

King’s Cross, Pancras Road exit 2. © Tim Marshall.

Pre-blight, there were dark pubs where the beer mat tended to stick to the bottom of the glass, but King’s Cross was full of interesting transients, and with a sooty, crepuscular, train-haunted feel. When coming down from York as a teenager, I would drink in two wonderful old pubs in the south end of York way. The first was the Duke of York. It’s now called ‘Offshore’. Nipping in there the other day, I asked the Antipodean barmaid if she knew what the pub had been called before. A rather cruel experiment, I admit. ‘As far as I know it’s always been called Offshore,’ she said. I wonder if she also thinks it’s always been painted sky blue, and carried the slogan ‘Backpacking the world’ as it does today. This would certainly have made it stand out in 1860.

The second pub was The Railway Tavern, which had a black and white tv as late as about 1995, and was full of railway men, with those distinctive box-like shoulder bags. It is now hidden behind a hoarding, waiting to re-emerge, hung, drawn and Regent Quartered. I suppose it’ll be a Juice Bar.

McDonalds, Pentonville Rd. © Tim Marshall.

In Staggs’s Gardens, the nice old Ham and Beef Shop suddenly becomes the Railway Eating House, and the word ‘Railway’ is imposed on everything, even buildings that have as yet only a façade. My fear for King’s Cross tends in the opposite direction. I worry it will lose its railway character. I could be wrong. Most of the old buildings on the Railway Lands are to be preserved. And many of the locations used in the Ladykillers – which was made in 1955 when getting on for forty trains a day were still coming into the goods yard – still survive.

King’s Boulevard. © Tim Marshall.

The house of the old lady, Mrs Wilberforce, tended to flit around a bit. Some of the exteriors were done in Goldington Crescent, which is just as elegant as ever. For her rear garden (from where the bodies of the crooks were dumped onto coal trains) a patch of grass on top of Copenhagen Tunnel was used, and if you go along to the end of Vale Royal, off York Way, you can see the very spot. A man keeps horses there. The top of the tunnel is all black, cracked Gothic battlements, and the trains still thunder underneath towards the mass of X’s that form the points leading into King’s Cross.

I do hope this prospect is preserved. If not…well, The Ladykillers is just out on DVD.

© Andrew Martin. His new novel The Night Train to Jamalpur is published by Faber on 7 of November. Tim Marshall‘s album King’s Cross Stories is on his Tumblr site.