The Upside and Downside of St Pancras

By Keith Waterhouse

NOT only because it boasts the longest champagne bar in Europe (but how long will it take to get a drink if you’re at the wrong end of the bar and the sole barman has only one pair of hands, hasn’t he?) do I welcome the phoenix-like rise of St Pancras station.

There was a time indeed, there was many a time when this noble Gothic folly looked like ending its days as a pile of rubble on the Euston Road, to be resuscitated as a concrete skyscraper. But the likes of Sir John Betjeman whose statue now stands on the station forecourt wouldn’t let go.

St Pancras, with its accompanying Midland Grand Hotel, will be as much one of the sights of London as the Millennium Eye and Changing of the Guard. Just so long as they remember to keep the champagne on ice.

Is this the dawn of another railway age? As a frequent flier on the Eurostar to Brussels, I sincerely hope so. Its magnificent St Pancras terminal gets it off to a brilliant start. Show me an airport, with its bossy jobsworths obsessively ordering queues round the block, to match even the grottiest railway station (or train station, as they now choose to be called). There isn’t one.

Mark you, we have grossly neglected our railway stations. By far the most elegant booking hall in Britain was the art deco Leeds City station, with its classy chandeliers and Thirties murals.

Then the city’s two stations were merged, and the booking hall became, disgracefully, a car park.

Only when someone finally realised there was more money to be made out of shops and bars than from parking tickets did it begin to get something of a wash and brush-up.

But you still can’t buy a ticket in the art deco booking hall.

PERHAPS the greatest station concourse in the world is New York’s Grand Central, almost Soviet in its spacious swank. But if it’s the human touch you crave, you have to descend to the cavernous Oyster Bar, perhaps the biggest and certainly the busiest lunch venue in New York the late lunch crowd dissipating around five only to make way for the early supper commuters.

Why, on this blessed plot, which invented the railway, do we have nothing to touch Grand Central’s Oyster Bar or the Parisian Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon? We seem to regard the railway as the natural depository of junk food.

There used to be a nice little seafood bar at Paddington station, but it didn’t last long, due to lack of trade. Now it’s a sushi bar. How long before it’s a McDonald’s? And how long before the longest champagne bar in Europe has signs up reading: ‘This section closed. Queue other side.’ Then there are the trains themselves. How long are we going to go on allowing buffet cars to put up their own discouraging signs saying: ‘No service after Peterborough’ because they have to cash up? Does it take an hour’s rail journey to count the takings from a few pork pies? (‘Sorry, squire, they didn’t put the sausage rolls on at Doncaster.’) WHAT we want, what we really want, is the return of Pullman cars. Why did they ever take them off? In the interests of misery, I suppose share the grief all round. I used to ride past a goods yard where Pullman cars, still resplendent in their brown and golden livery and emblazoned with their given name Doris, Pearl, Muriel were slowly left to rot.

I used to travel up to Victoria daily on the Brighton Belle, when Olivier could be seen tucking into his breakfast kipper, and suits bound for the City would be ordering their first GT of the day.

If these are the times the rejuvenated St Pancras wishes to recapture, it still has a good many railway miles to go.

Cold calling

Cold calling I AM beginning to feel like one of those old-wig judges who used to ask: Who are The Beatles? What is the iPhone? What does it do? Everything, it seems provided youre prepared to queue all night and then pay the price of a conference call to the moon to get your hands on it. I have the strongest antipathy towards things with nothing better to do with their time than to do the things other things ought to be doing. The nearest I have ever had in my household to one of these all-rounder, clever-clever devices was a vacuum cleaner that claimed to beat as it sweeps as it cleans. Self-confessed gadget freaks like Stephen Fry may hail the iPhone as the best innovation since sliced bread and the Second Coming, but when you pick it up a recorded voice will still trill: Hi! Have you ever thought youre paying too much for your public utilities? The electronic equivalent of the Swiss army knife it may well be, but I say its a telephone and I say the hell with it.

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