Through reasons of personal idiocy I have had to spend quite a few mornings sitting in the consular section of the British embassy listening to people shouting at the even-tempered blonde behind the bulletproof glass.
The room is usually sprinkled with expats and hopefuls, but over successive days I discovered that the core population seemed to be British visitors who had been mugged or pick-pocketed within a very few hundred metres of one another. Be you a wily oldster, a street-wise teen or a weary young family, it seems that if you want to get robbed Brussels’ Gare du Midi station is your primary destination.
Belgium’s Eurostar hub is nothing short of a national embarrassment. It is ugly, dangerous, disgustingly lit, nastily laid out, confusing and inaccessible. I write all this because in truth it is those who are responsible for the Gare du Midi, rather than any potential travellers, who should really be taking a look at Saint Pancras station, the effect that its development has had on the idea of the station as a public space, and the impact that it is continuing to have on the surrounding area.
Saint Pancras was always a bombastic proposition – a temple to the modern age that was also a simple piece of old-fashioned one-upmanship; a new railway station squeezed in between Euston and King’s Cross, purposefully designed to make its rivals look petty and old-fashioned.
With three major stations running their tracks across it, the area north of Euston road has, for over 150 years, been a near useless piece of land; a vast brown-field site separating Camden and Islington and making the northern parts of those boroughs seem very separate from central London. Perhaps as a result, the area directly around King’s Cross became famous for drug dealing, prostitution, street drunks and petty theft. Like the Gare du Midi it was, and to a certain extent still is, synonymous with casual crime.
Much has already been written about how pretty Saint Pancras is and the wonderful and expensive renovation of Barlow’s train shed and the Undercroft beneath it. But what concerns the traveller more than the quality of the oak doors, the brass facings or the reproduction Victorian clockface (made by the company that did Big Ben) is whether or not they’re going to be safe.
Travellers are vulnerable, they carry valuable items through a place they often don’t know very well and are often stressed and careless because they’re in a rush. The challenge is to make them feel safe and reassured. Although it’s early days, the station seems to be doing a good job. We mock the British for their obsession with CCTV cameras – the immediate Saint Pancras area has over 200 – but you can’t accuse them of not showing willing.
Inspired by Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport they have taken enormous pains with the signage, to make sure that it is as easy as possible to find your way around. The station owners also decided that it was worth protecting their investment by instituting a higher than usual staff to customer ratio and have made a special agreement with London transport police to place the station under tighter controls. Initial impressions suggest that if you are really determined to have your passport stolen, you’re probably going to have to wait until you arrive in Brussels.
Like the Gare du Midi, Saint Pancras has a peculiar geographical relationship with the city centre – it’s near, but not quite part of it. There are some local businesses, but no local high street, so part of the renovation work was to create one on the lower floor of the station. When the public relations office talk about making the station a destination in itself, they don’t necessarily mean that they want people from Brussels to take the train over so that they can hang out in WH Smith. They mean that it will become the place where people working at Camden council or the British Library will meet up to eat a good lunch, and maybe buy some underwear or a birthday present.
It’s an inviting environment – they use as much natural light as possible, and the shop fronts are high and transparent so that the Victorian brick archways of the old Undercroft are constantly in view. The financial logic behind creating pleasant spaces like this is what marketeers call the ripple effect – nice people and nice businesses want to come and form concentric rings of niceness around the nice new core.
As well as watching to see if they stimulate a general improvement in the area, the Saint Pancras renovation has taken in hand the development of the brown-field site. Saint Martin’s college is creating a vast new complex for 5,500 art students on it, there will be new apartment blocks aping the forms of the old gas containers, and pedestrian foot bridges are planned so that people can trot across the Regent’s canal and into the mooted farmer’s market underneath the station.
At lunchtime I sat in the much-hyped champagne bar which stretches along the side of the Eurostar platform, and it was indeed full of people drinking champagne. They presented an interesting mix – young mums showing off babies to the grandparents, blow-dried girls with Burberry bags splitting a bottle with their tanned boyfriends, editors from the local publishing house out for a quick bitch and a lunchtime treat.
When I last checked, London had become the kind of city where you did not drink at lunchtime, and train stations were the site of administrative arguments rather than romance. With its elegant public spaces, bistros and bars, it seems that along with the high-speed trainlines, Saint Pancras has picked up some other naughty continental values, not least the idea that if a meal is worth eating it is worth taking time over. When I sent my sister a message telling her where I was she was jealous. When was the last time that anyone could say that of you at Midi?