OFF THE SHELF
The King’s Cross Story: 200 years of history in the railway lands
By Peter Darley (softback, The History Press, 216pp, £30, ISBN 9 780750 985796).
THE name King’s Cross is to the railway sector what Wembley is to football. It was the great cathedral of steam from where the record-breaking GNR and LNER locomotives set off into the realm of legend.
However, this new book by the founder of Camden Railway Heritage Trust delves deeper into the history of the area around the terminus, and the once run down area where you might think twice about walking alone at night, to the dynamic redevelopment of today, in which King’s Cross is being transformed with offices, homes and places for arts and leisure.
It is a fascinating journey of rediscovery through a place so many of us take for granted, and the volume is superbly illustrated with drawings, sketches, maps and diagrams from as far back as the early 19th century when the coaching inn in Maiden Lane was the region’s transport, up, right through the days of Gresley to modern times.
The volume is also a splendid social documentary on the part that the railway played over the centuries in the everyday commercial and social life of the capital, and how work on steam locomotives created an“aristocracy of the working classes.”
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