Restoration man
HS1 Chairman ROB HOLDEN looks back at the station’s dramatic rebirth in 2007.
On November 6 2007, Her Majesty the Queen re-opened a newly refurbished St Pancras International, marking a new and exciting chapter in the history of the worldfamous cathedral-like station.
Costing £ 800 million and involving more than 5,000 individual contractors, the threeyear transformation of William Barlow’s great trainshed into an international terminus not only resurrected a grand old station that had fallen into severe disrepair, but provided the catalyst for several billion pounds’ worth of regeneration in the surrounding area.
Among the select group of officials who greeted the Queen and HRH the Duke of Edinburgh on their arrival at the royal opening ceremony was Rob Holden, who was Chief Executive of London and Continental Railways (LCR) at the time.
LCR was the company formed in 1994 to revamp the station as part of its wider £ 5.8bn project to build a new 68-mile Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) through London and Kent, which was subsequently rebranded as High Speed 1 when it opened in 2007.
Holden is now Chairman of HS1 Ltd, which commenced a 30-year concession to own and operate High Speed 1 in November 2010.
He vividly recalls his first visit to St Pancras with LCR in 1996. The cavernous station was much more lightly used then, and in a state of slow decay following many years of neglect under British Rail.
“The place was full of diesel fumes from the handful of trains that served the Midland Main Line and the roof was a mixture of glass and corrugated iron,” he says. “You couldn’t see the sky because the glass was covered in many decades of accumulated soot.
“Only about half of the platforms were in use and the undercroft, which had never been open to the public, was a venue for drug use and prostitution. I had feelings of trepidation
You felt like you were working on a project that you would want to tell your grand kids about. Steve Kay, UK Infrastructure Operations Manager, Bechtel
The building was a complete nightmare; things were always falling off the roof and maintenance costs wereabigconcern. Rob Holden, Chairman, HS1 Ltd
refurbishment of St Pancras would be one of the most time-consuming elements of building the railway and then, all of a sudden, we were given less time to build section two.”
What were the biggest engineering challenges? Holden points to the poor condition of some of the original ironwork which had deteriorated far more than anticipated since being erected in the 1860s. The project designers also had to find an innovative way to remove sections of the raised deck at track level in order to open up the undercroft beneath without undermining the structural integrity of the vast 240ft by 100ft trainshed roof.
“We weren’t able to fully understand the scope of the job until we’d undertaken some intrusive surveys of the station. Corrosion had been causing serious damage to the ironwork of one section that had been hit by a bomb in the First World War, and that wasn’t discovered for quite some time.
“The other issue of concern was how we could go about excavating holes at platform level to allow natural light to filter down to the ground floor, where lots of the shops are now. In the original design the ends of the main iron roof spans were tied together beneath the platforms to form what was then the world’s largest single-span structure. Breaking into that required some intricate calculations and a lot of new high-tensile steel cables to make sure the whole thing didn’t fall down.”
But for Holden the most satisfying aspect of the refurbishment has been the extent of the regenerative effect it has had on the surrounding area. Since 2007, the reopened St Pancras International has helped stimulate the development of new hotels, restaurants, offices and apartments across the previously derelict King’s Cross neighbourhood, which now supports more than 12,000 jobs at some of the world’s largest companies, including Google.
He concludes: “When LCR had to seek financial assistance from the Government in 1998, people talked about the project’s benefits in a certain order of priority. Benefits to international and domestic travel were ranked first and second and regeneration was a poor third. In fact, I remember the Department for Transport being criticised by the Public Accounts Committee for arguing that regeneration would be as high as £ 0.5bn, but we’ve since gone on record to say that it’s been at least ten times that.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and St Pancras is upheld as an example in so many ways. Prior to 2007 you only came here to get on a train. Now there are many reasons to come here. The mix of usages is what I’m most proud of, rather than any particular physical feature.”