St Pancras, this afternoon.
One of the reasons I now do what I do is that my dad, when I was a kid, used to take me each week to see the aeroplanes at Speke in Liverpool. The airport was minutes in the car from my grandmother's house in this 'garden suburb' (alas now, an altogether different story, for another day). There we would watch planes, mainly from the 1950s and 60s, trundling out to the Isle of Man, or waiting for the occasional exotic modern jet, diverted, presumably to the deep irritation of passengers, because of fog at Heathrow, or Manchester, or Prestwick (not) near Glasgow. Indeed I met my first American at Speke - a Transamerica DC10, diverted from god knows. She sat right by the fence on Speke Hall Avenue, the biggest thing I'd ever seen and then left a few hours later, forever imprinted in a nine year old's head.
Speke was one of the first and, when it opened in the 1930s, grandest airport terminals in the world, a wonderful art deco curve overlooking the Mersey estuary and featuring a glorious sweep of spectator's terrace, nearly as impressive as that of the kop at the city's top (obviously) football club, at Anfield. It was a fitting next step for the city that, for many years had staggering volumes of people migrate through it, by ship and onward normally by train, unless they settled and worked in the industries that fuelled this great migration.
Speke in Liverpool was one of the first and, when it opened in the 1930s, grandest, airport terminals in the world.
By the time I was around, Speke had hit hard times. The terminal was grotty and 1980s Liverpool was in devastating decline, serviced by air with a small number of regular flights in elderly (but wonderful) screeching Vickers Viscounts. To this day I can recognise the sound of their engines, now only in use in a few antique planes. Indeed until last year I would ever so often be awoken in the night by the sound of a Rolls Royce Dart-powered plane, presumably an HS748, flying at high level over London, on some night postal flight between who knows where.
In the late seventies and early eighties, when I was somewhere between 8 and 15, Speke was a relic, the great 1930s dashed-hope of a port city investing in the next big thing. But unlike London, which transitioned from a great port city to become a great airport city, Liverpool stalled and then dived. Families like mine fled the city, which is why I come from a place called Frodsham, famous only for being the home of Gary Barlow of Take That. With all due respect to Gary, who I knew at school and is very nice, it's not quite the home of John, Paul, George and Ringo.
What, you may ask, has this got to do with St Pancras Station?
Well quite a lot, actually. Because as Liverpool declined, London became without doubt Britain's most important gateway city. And while you might think that it understood this was happening, and rebuilt itself to cope, the reality was different. In fact, today, as the first day that Eurostar trains slipped away to accelerate to 186mph for the journey to Europe, we saw London for the first time boldly acknowledge this inheritance. Don't believe me? Well step next door from St Pancras into Kings Cross Station and feel the smallness of ambition to open up the city to the outside. Or travel south of the river and look once again over the once heralded, now empty Eurostar terminal at Waterloo, which for a while seemed very cool but compared to St Pancras seems mere dust.
14.11.07: Waterloo station on its first morning without Eurostar seemed mighty sad.
Because as London expanded its international transport infrastructure through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, there was none of the bold ambition associated with Speke's 1930s airport, despite its tiny size in comparison to even a minor building at Heathrow. And when British Rail was upgrading itself through the 1970s and 80s, launching first the Intercity 125 and the later 225 from Kings Cross to the north and from Paddington (for the 125) out west, there was a sense was that it was trying to compete with aviation, but as an eternal underdog. And to date, the results have felt like that - Kings Cross, just next door, is grim, with a tiny concourse and grubby outlets. Paddington is nice in a Brunel kind of way and Liverpool Street looks okay, despite the fact that the trains from it are, without exception, pathetic. And of course Heathrow is still the most embarrassing place to spend time in Britain.
St Pancras is altogether different. Surely lucky in catching the mood of the time, it is astonishing in its scale, its execution, its sense of history and modernity, and the excellence of the product that it is a gateway to. For as Europeans worry about the ethics and climate impact of short haul air travel, and with the cost of the Channel Tunnel buried somewhere out of the way now, the Eurostar suddenly seems to make a lot of sense. But just like buses, bold international transport infrastructure would appear to all come at once. From March next year, Heathrow Airport will have Terminal 5, by far the most spectacular airport terminal ever built in Britain. I really can't imagine, bar some very unfortunate design problems, why I will ever again fly on an airline apart from British Airways, who has, by a stroke of genius, bagged the entire place.
St Pancras, 14 November 2007. Champagne anyone?
And while in Britain air travel balances its dual roles of most popular activity (we love flying far away) and most unpopular activity (we know doing so does nasty things to the atmosphere), St Pancras just seems really cool.
In the end, I'm not sure whether St Pancras is the beginning of a great renaissance for new stations. The economics of railways are very problematic, mainly because they are very very expensive and specialise in taking people from where they didn't necessarily want to be to where they don't often want to go, with a transit required at each end to get to A and B, so to speak. Indeed, it takes a twenty minute conversation with the Dutch Super Bus team at TU Delft to realise that while railways evolved as the easiest way to move heavy loads across long distances, requiring rudimentary levelling, wooden supports and the laying of two evenly spaced lines of metal, the design creep ever since has made them very complex, expensive and of questionable utility to many. Rail has many flaws - an inability for one thing to pass another, of the need to go in a fairly straight line often across land full of things and of the inability to climb steep slopes. Add to that the fact that demand peaks are very expensive to handle, because you need extra trains for the busy times, which can't be redeployed elsewhere, unlike planes which are hugely redeployable and thus have far better utilisation on capital employed. Add also the fact that, much of the time, the pathway itself isn't actually being used. Have you ever stood by a railway line? Most of the time nobody is going past. It is sometimes surprising we've stuck with railways as a system.
And as for Speke Airport? Well the old terminal closed in 1986, sat derelict for many years and was then thankfully converted into a Marriott Hotel which is quite nice, if a bit corporate. The functioning airport moved a mile or so southeast to a new airfield, was renamed John Lennon Airport, features an enormous tin shed as a terminal and is now one of the busiest low cost airline hubs in Britain.
What all this says about the state of rail and air travel is a long discussion and frankly just for today we shouldn't worry about it. After Joe and I spent an hour or two absorbed in the atmosphere of St Pancras station this afternoon, I took a tube back to Bermondsey. The only thing I could find on my iPod that felt right was Bach's St Matthew Passion. I can assure you I don't normally sit on the tube listening to grand orchestras and soaring choirs. But today the indie bands from Liverpool and Manchester can take a rest. Because London has a new cathedral - to the journey. I'd urge everyone to see it and enjoy what is says about the past and the future of how we travel.
Mark Charmer is director of The Movement Design Bureau. Posted on 14 November 2007.
Photo credits: Stewart Bale Ltd Archive. Rest are MDB.
This image gives an idea of what's going on, though WheelTug insists the final motor will be smaller, lighter and more directly integrated with the nose wheel structure
