Extreme Acts of Psychogeography

How a glacier shaped a railway station.

Welcome to Londonist: Time Machine. Friday’s newsletter is usually part-paywalled. However, this week it’s Half Term; I’m up to my eyebrows in children and not able to write a full article without getting strawberry milkshake all over it. So, instead, I’ve adapted something that first tipped out of my brain about a decade ago. As it’s not entirely fresh, I’ve left the paywall off ❌ so that everyone can have a ponder. Enjoy!

(History Radar will return next week!)

Why King's Cross Station Looks Like Something From The Ice Age

This is the main concourse at King's Cross station, when under construction just over a decade ago.

Image: Network Rail

It's been likened to many things, including a flying saucer, the Starship Enterprise and, more prosaically, the roof of the British Museum. To my eye, it resembles a glacier. Like this one:

The Elephant’s Foot Glacier in Greenland. Image: Sentinel Hub under creative commons licence

For those of a psychogeographic bent, this similarity is apposite. The concourse's circular form was quite possibly dictated by the melting of a glacier in a distant ice age... at least if you want to believe the historical thought experiment that follows. Here goes...

See that building on the right of our top image? That's the Great Northern Hotel, which opened in 1854 and is often described as the first purpose-built hotel in London. Here's a shot I took while standing on the roof of St Pancras a few years back:

Image: Matt Brown

The hotel of 1854, designed by Lewis Cubitt, is Grade II listed. When the time came to build the modern concourse, planners could not knock down this protected building, and nor did they want to. Instead, its gentle curve was incorporated into the designs. The two fit together hand in glove. The shape and diameter of the concourse were thus determined by the hotel designs from 170 years ago.

But why did Lewis Cubitt make his hotel curvy? Why not build a normal hotel, with normal straight edges? He had a very good reason. Land space was tight, and his hotel had to follow the curve of the existing Pancras Road. This map from 1864 shows the set-up:

The Great Northern Hotel is shown as a grey shaded area, as indicated by the overly enthusiastic red arrow. We can see that the hotel follows the curve of Weston Place, a recent name for the southern end of Pancras Road. Image: Public Domain

Pancras Road is ancient, and features on the earliest maps of the area. But why does the road — which informed the shape of the hotel, which informed the shape of the new concourse — follow a curve?

Here, our old friend John Rocque can be of service. Around the same time he published his 1746 map of central London (the one I’m colouring in), he also put out a map showing the London area ‘10 miles around’. This is one of the first maps to feature the area that would become King’s Cross, then known as Battle Bridge. I’ve annotated it below:

I’ve also coloured in the River Fleet, which still ran through the area above ground in the mid-18th century. We can immediately see that Pancras Road takes a sharp kink to the north at the site of the future hotel (red text). It does so because of the river. The route was laid down long ago to follow the banks of the Fleet.

Indeed, here's a famous image of the Fleet’s sparkling waters in front of Pancras Road (you can see a wagon moving along) and St Pancras Old Church from 1827, before the area was transformed by the railways. This image shows the area in the top-left of my map above, where we can see the buildings below the word ‘PANCRAS’.

But anyway, to recap: the King’s Cross station concourse got its curve from the hotel;
the hotel got its curve from Pancras Road;
Pancras Road got its curve from the River Fleet;

And how did the River Fleet come to be here? Well, this is the vague bit, but its current course was probably set by the tumultuous events of the last ice age, when retreating and melting glaciers altered the shape of the lands and rivers of north London.

We’re back here again.

So we have: glacier makes river makes road makes hotel makes concourse, which happens to look like glacier.

Had that long-gone glacier melted in a slightly different way, then we might now be catching trains from a wedge-shaped station, or boarding half a mile to the east, or enjoying a pre-journey pint inside another oblong shed. Eons-old meltwater determined the location of mezzanine sushi shops thousands of years later, and brought these words to your screen today.

Everything is connected… except perhaps the East Coast Mainline whenever I happen to need it.

Can I claim my PhD in psychogeography now?

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Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave your own dubious chains of logic in the comments below. Or email me any time on matt@londonist.com