Episode notes
In the 1860s the Midland Railway was paying rival Great Northern tolls of one shilling and nine pence per ton to reach London, and its coal trains were jammed at junctions like Rugby. So it built its own 50 mile line from Bedford to Euston Road, demolishing the slum of Agar Town. Because the tracks had to clear the Regent's Canal, they arrived 20 feet up, and engineer William Henry Barlow, with Rowland Mason Ordish, covered them with a single wrought iron arch 689 feet long, 240 feet wide, and 100 feet high, then the largest enclosed space in the world. The void below was left open, its columns spaced to fit Burton beer barrels. George Gilbert Scott's Gothic Midland Grand Hotel fronted the station, which opened on October 1, 1868.
A German Gotha raid killed 20 people in the booking hall in 1918, and in May 1941 a bomb exploded in the beer vaults, yet the station closed for only eight days. The bigger threat came in the 1960s, when British Rail planned to demolish it. John Betjeman and Jane Hughes Fawcett of the Victorian Society won Grade I listing in November 1967, ten days before demolition was due. In 1978 the 18 foot Dent clock fell and shattered during a sale, and retiring guard Roland Hoggard bought the pieces for 25 pounds. Chosen as the Channel Tunnel terminus, St Pancras reopened on November 6, 2007, after an 800 million pound rebuild that put security in the old beer vaults.
- How the tie girders under the tracks work like the string on an archery bow
- The furious Mrs. Fawcett, as British Rail officials called her
- Michael Heseltine's push to route high speed trains through East London
- Clockmakers using Hoggard's rebuilt dial as the template for the replica clock
- Paul Day's nine meter statue The Meeting Place and a bronze of Betjeman gazing up at the roof