“When a man is tired of London….”

 

Not yet, anyway! Primarily this time for Neil Young at Hyde Park, and after escaping from the heat outside with JWM Turner at Tate Britain the next day, we ended up at the redeveloped landscape behind Kings Cross and St Pancras stations. I never got to 34A Kings Cross sheds, nor the portals of Copenhagen tunnel and its surrounding streets where the Ealing Comedy, The Ladykillers, was filmed. It’s also taken us some time to get there after renewal, though I’d been told it was well worth a visit.

The land north of and between the approaches to Kings Cross and St Pancras had been railway land since the mid-nineteenth century. The goods yards and sidings of the Great Northern Railway included warehouses, gasometers and coal drops, where goods trains arrived from the Yorkshire collieries on the upper levels and dumped their coal onto the carts [and later the lorries] below. Coal also went to make coal gas, which was stored in grey, cylindrical gasometers, once a common feature of most towns and cities. Coal was also distributed along the Regents Canal, connected to the Grand Union Canal at Little Venice, beyond Paddington station.  

In a major renewal programme begun at the start of the present century, the old has been impressively incorporated into the new in a series of imaginative designs. The canal provides a leisure walkway and barge rides, the gasometer frames are now wrapped around modern apartments, high-tech’ office blocks provide employment, and the coal drops, themselves, have been preserved and adapted to attract top-end retailers, bars and restaurants. The tree-lined square that sits between the canal bridge and these redevelopments has plentiful seating, an outsize TV screen [showing an embarrassingly one-way Wimbledon ladies final on the afternoon that we were there], paved areas with fountains to the delight of the children getting thoroughly soaked on a hot summer’s day, outdoor art displays – currently a summer seaside photographic exhibition, and all surrounded by lively bars and cafes. I found the whole scene most uplifting. What a triumph it is, showing just what can be done where there is a determination to retain important elements of our built history and at the same time bringing new opportunities to formerly run-down inner urban areas and successfully breathing new life into forgotten corners of our old cities.