1st October 1868. St. Pancras.

Welcome to October.

‘Brown October’ is the month of changing leaf colour. Most green in nature comes from Chlorophyll ( green leaf ) from the Greek: (chloros: ‘green’) and (phyllon ‘leaf’), which has a single magnesium atom at the centre of the molecule which absorbs both high energy violet light and low energy red light making the reflected light appear green.

Sandwiched between Euston, the first station to be opened in July 1837 and Kings Cross opened in 1852, St. Pancras Station, engineered by William Barlow was opened Today in 1868. 

The cast iron, arched ribs advertising the Butterley Company 1867, who engineered the roof, was designed by Sir John Alleyne of Butterley’s, of a station then having the world’s largest enclosed space. An undercroft was built for the storage of Burton beer casks, with the cast iron pillars spaced accordingly.

Name plate of The Butterley Company.

Arguably the most individual and striking of the London stations it now meant that the Midland Railway could run over its own metals to its own terminus, rather than relying on the grudging hospitality of the Great Northern running from Hitchen to King’s Cross.(1)

St. Pancras Station by George Gilbert Scott.

The adjacent Gothic hotel, designed by George Gilbert Scott, was opened in 1873 being the first to have lifts called ascending rooms. Bricks were made by Gripper of Nottingham and decorative ironwork by Skidmore of Coventry.

Using Barry’s idea for the Houses of Parliament, Scott increased a sense of height by having a steep roof and many towers and spirelets, but by the 1930.s was under threat being regarded as too sham medieval and ornate.

In the New Millennium, St Pancras, after a mammoth reconstruction became the terminus of the ‘Eurostar’ railway to the continent.

Stations at the time of the opening of St. Pancras, were hives of activity with carefully graded waiting rooms for both gentlemen and ladies, offering storage facilities for 4d a day such items as bath chairs, bikes, hawkers’ handcarts, street pianos and scissor-grinder machines. They were also plastered with much advertising including Dickens’ latest novel and later the traditional enamelled signs.

Like all developments the station came at a cost, as it required the removal of graves of the old St. Pancras church, to be supervised by architect, later author, Thomas Hardy, for which he penned a poem.

Gravestones by the Hardy Tree.

‘O passenger, pray list and catch/ Our sighs and piteous groans, Half stifled in this jumbled patch of wrenched memorial stones’: ‘The Levelled Graveyard’.

Thomas Hardy referring to St Pancras Old Church; a tree growing there surrounded by gravestones is called the ‘Hardy Tree’.

Shelley had planned an elopement with Mary over meetings at the grave of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft at the church of old St. Pancras.  The Church was also the setting by Dickens for body-snatchers in his ‘Tale of Two Cities’.

(1) The Midland was later incorporated into the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), the first to introduce dining cars and upholstered seats for the Third Class passengers. The Midland, with its HQ in Derby, didn’t reach London until 1867 and its lines had to cross a canal and old graveyard and one of the assistants charged with organising the reburials, was Thomas Hardy.

References:

londonist.com/Pic.

wikipedia.org/Pics.