King’s Cross, St Pancras and the Flying Scotsman: London’s great railways, the back story

About King’s Cross, St Pancras and the Flying Scotsman: London’s great railways, the back story

By the ULTIMATE London Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

London is where the railway grew up. In 1863 it opened the world’s first underground railway; at King’s Cross the Flying Scotsman set off for Edinburgh; and next door, St Pancras, saved from demolition, now sends the Eurostar under the sea to Paris.

The first underground railway

On 10 January 1863 the Metropolitan Railway opened between Paddington and Farringdon: the first underground railway in the world, worked at first by steam locomotives in shallow tunnels. The Underground has grown ever since, and today the Tube carries millions of Londoners a day.

King’s Cross and the Flying Scotsman

King’s Cross, opened in 1852 to the designs of Lewis Cubitt, is a station of beautiful simplicity: two great arched train sheds behind a plain brick front. From here the expresses of the East Coast Main Line run north to York, Newcastle and Edinburgh, the route of the Flying Scotsman, which from 1928 ran non-stop between London and Edinburgh. The locomotive of the same name, built in 1923, became the first steam engine officially recorded at 100 mph, in 1934.

At St Pancras, the statue of the poet who saved the station gazes up at the roof he loved.

Under the restored roof and the white lattice of the new western concourse, look for Platform 9¾, the departure point of the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter books, where a luggage trolley disappears into the wall and the queue for photos rarely stops.

St Pancras

Next door stands the most theatrical station in Britain. William Henry Barlow’s train shed, opened in 1868, was the largest single-span roof in the world when it was built; in front of it rises George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic hotel, the Midland Grand, opened in 1873 and reborn as the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. In the 1960s the station was threatened with demolition; the campaign to save it was led by the poet John Betjeman, whose bronze statue by Martin Jennings now stands on the upper concourse, looking up at the roof.

Since 14 November 2007, St Pancras International has been London’s Eurostar terminal. Trains have run through the Channel Tunnel since 1994, and the journey to Paris Gare du Nord takes around two and a quarter hours. Look for Paul Day’s nine-metre bronze, The Meeting Place, of a couple embracing beneath the station clock.

A memorial at Liverpool Street

Outside Liverpool Street station, Frank Meisler’s sculpture Kindertransport – The Arrival remembers the children, some 10,000 of them, most of them Jewish, who escaped Nazi Europe to Britain in 1938 and 1939; many arrived here by train. Meisler was himself one of them.

Our advice: start at King’s Cross, cross Pancras Road to St Pancras for the roof and the Betjeman statue, and have a drink under the clock before your Eurostar. For a steam day, look out for Flying Scotsman’s special trips, or visit the National Railway Museum in York, two hours north from King’s Cross.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with King’s Cross, St Pancras and the Flying Scotsman: London’s great railways, the back story before you go.