St Pancras station's basement was measured out in beer barrels
Beneath the platforms of London's St Pancras lies a vast undercroft laid out like a brewery warehouse, its columns spaced to fit barrels of beer shipped in from Burton. Above it, William Henry Barlow's iron roof was the largest single span on Earth, and the whole station nearly vanished in the 1960s.
The Midland Railway had lines across the Midlands and the north but none of its own into London. During the 1862 International Exhibition its trains crawled over a rival's track, while the other route in was gridlocked with coal trains, so the company won approval in 1863 for an extension of just under 50 miles from Bedford. Coal and goods, burdened by a toll on the rival line, were the main motive, but the Midland also wanted a prestigious frontage on Euston Road. The station went up on the site of a slum called Agar Town and opened on 1 October 1868, its first arrival an overnight mail train from Leeds.
Because the tracks had to cross the Regent's Canal, the platforms sat about 20 feet above the street. Rather than fill the space below with spoil, the company used it for freight, particularly beer, and built it on the grid used for beer warehouses. To keep supports out of that space, Barlow sprang a single arch straight from platform level: 689 feet long, 240 feet wide and 100 feet high, then the biggest enclosed space in the world. George Gilbert Scott's ornate red-brick Gothic Midland Grand Hotel was added across the front.
Hard times followed. After the 1921 railway mergers, Euston became the favoured terminus, and the hotel closed in 1935. During an air raid overnight on 10–11 May 1941, a bomb crashed through platform 3 and exploded in the beer vaults, closing the station for eight days. In the late 1960s planners proposed demolishing it outright, but campaigners including the poet John Betjeman, Jane Hughes Fawcett and the Victorian Society secured Grade I listing ten days before demolition was due to begin.
Its revival came with an £800 million refurbishment as the terminus of High Speed 1, opened by Queen Elizabeth II in November 2007. Eurostar trains now leave for Belgium, France and the Netherlands, alongside services to the Midlands, Kent and across London.
Source: St Pancras railway station
