A conversion on the road to King’s Cross
What more can you say about King’s Cross, the great cathedral of steam, the Great Northern Railway’s London gateway to Scotland? Its colossal heritage needs little introduction.
Network Rail’s £550-million redevelopment plan for ‘The Cross’ did not see its magnificence go the way of neighbour Euston – which saw most of its proud heritage razed in the early Sixties in favour of a utilitarian brushed concrete replacement – but a cutting-edge scheme combined the finest of the past with the ultra-modern needs of the 21st century and beyond.
In the wake of the Beeching closures of the 1960s, Britain surrendered much of its proud railway history. Following the closure of branch lines, cross-country routes and main lines that ‘doubled up’, the infrastructure that survived was often pared to the bone.
The length and breadth of the country, engine and goods sheds were demolished, station canopies removed, station buildings demolished and replaced by bus shelters and the like. Rationalisation and streamlining meant anaesthetisation, in a countrywide-purge that was the network’s equivalent of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Today, we would not even think of demolishing a parish church, castle or historic manor house, for these are key buildings in the origin and heritage of a settlement. Yet what was blatantly ignored up to more recent enlightened times was the fact that railways and stations were the point of origin of the post-Industrial Revolution growth of so many cities, suburbs, towns and villages. It was the railway that shaped the map of modern Britain,
