44 C O N T E X T 1 0 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8 and a brothel. Individual building studies are supplemented by essays by other authors. Among these guest contributions there is a preface by Alain de Botton; Peter Stewart contributes an essay on the language of architectural style; and a radio producer, Lawrence Pollard, writes about sound as a dimension of architectural space. The book also looks at the exploration of buildings and spaces through art. An installation by Patricia Mackinnon-Day in Exeter incorporates objects found on the site, including a crushed soft drink can, among archaeological finds. Ken Wilder responds to the spaces within an engine house at Botallack in Cornwall by setting out trays of milk. Gerry Judah’s sculpture draws on the qualities of ruins to evoke the elusive and ambiguous nature of absence. The book is generously and beautifully illustrated with contemporary and historic photographs and drawings. Material is drawn from a range of sources. Many of the photographs are by Littlefield and Lewis themselves. Their pictures are often as eloquent as the text in leading the reader towards a grasp of the peculiar quality of formerly inhabited spaces. How close does the book get to capturing this fugitive and intangible sense of passing lives within buildings? Generally Lewis is more successful than her co-author, whose pieces are sometimes relatively straightforward descriptions of conversion schemes. Lewis’s piece about the Moor Street Hotel in London’s Soho is a wonderful evocation of the seedy side of urban life and its often brutally pragmatic effect on building fabric. The group of buildings had been adapted in a completely ad hoc way to serve the needs of various industries for which the area is famous. At the time when the book was being written, it was being rebuilt and adapted to form a hotel. In a different tone, JohnYates’ lyrical vignette, inset into Littlefield’s chapter on Ditherington Flax Mill In Shrewsbury, imagines the voices of those who built, changed and worked in the Mill.Yates perfectly encapsulates the spirit of that great building. ‘The Flax Mill,’ he writes, ‘tells us loud and clear about how she was built. The iron frame and vaulted brick floors explain themselves so lucidly that we can almost hear (engineer) Charles Bage describing them to us.’ Readers searching for a rigorous and coherent argument running through ArchitecturalVoices are likely to be disappointed. The book is best treated as an anthology of often thoughtful and illuminating essays leading the reader, as Lewis suggests in her epilogue, to look around to discover their own stories and relationships to space, time and material. Michael Taylor is historic areas adviser with English Heritage in the west midlands region. Point of departure St Pancras Station Simon Bradley, Profile Books, 2007, 224pp ISBN 13 978 1 861 979 5 13, paperback, £8.99 St Pancras has been my London point of arrival and departure for over 30 years. I have had many waiting hours to contemplate its shady, melancholy beauty. Over the past few years things have been changing and now St Pancras is a triumph. Barlow’s great roof is resplendent with new glazing and skyblue ironwork; it echoes to the rumble and screech of decelerating Eurostars, and buzzes with snatches of French and Dutch conversation. Meanwhile Scott’s great frontage building is being converted and brought back to life as a hotel and apartments. Arriving bang on time to mark this transformation is Simon Bradley’s book St Pancras Station, part of Profile Books’ Wonders of theWorld series. Historians such as Jack Simmons have chronicled the station before, but Bradley’s book sets out to be concise and accessible: as suitable for reading on an Intercity 125 as at a library desk. Bradley begins by tracing the roots of George Gilbert Scott’s design for the Midland Grand Hotel in the gothic revival. Scott used gothic freely as a quarry for architectural language for a modern building.William Henry Barlow’s train shed stands in a line of evolution punctuated by other London termini and stations such as the original Birmingham New Street,York and Newcastle. But it and the undercroft beneath the platforms, now part of the circulation space of the new station, were a response to site-specific constraints and engineering requirements. Competition between railway companies in the mid 19th century was ruthless. The Midland Railway came relatively late to the capital and was perilously stretched financially when St Pancras first opened in September 1868. The first arrivals and departures came and went without ceremony. Bradley’s narrative continues with a description of the evolution and working of the Midland Grand Hotel, and the lives both of the guests and the army of backstairs domestic staff. By the early decades of the 20th century the hotel was struggling as a business. The author notes that its closure in the 1930s saved its grand interiors from the modernisation which destroyed much of the historic interest of other railway hotels. The growth of the Victorian railway system triggered a complex web of social and economic effects. Bradley’s talent for combining the grand historical sweep with an eye for quirky detail is at its best as he describes the influence of the railway system on advertising, on the development of the jam industry, and on the symbiotic relationship between the Midland Railway and the distribution of the Melton Mowbray pork pie. The chapter on the resurrection of St Pancras affords Context readers a rare moment of encouragement. Threats to the buildings in the 1960s were vague but ominous. Listing at Grade I in 1967, following a campaign by the Victorian Society, protected St Pancras during decades of half-hearted proposals and neglect. A turning point came in 1994 when the government decided that St Pancras would be London’s international terminus. A sequence of events began that has led to what one of my colleagues recently described as ‘the greatest railway station in the world’. Simon Bradley narrates the history and development of St Pancras with scholarship and style. Read and enjoy his book – and go to see St Pancras. Michael Taylor
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