This is the final part of my walk around King’s Cross after the walk led by the Greater London Industrial Archeology Society finished on Saturday 8th April 1989. The previous post was Goods Way, Gasholders & St Pancras.
I was clearly in no hurry to get home and spent some time wandering around the area taking pictures. In this post they are in the order that I made them, along with some others, mainly near duplicates, but I haven’t kept to this in posting them to the album.
This block of flats was built 1864-5 by the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, architect Matthew Allen. They were grade II listed five years after I made this picture and have been retained in the fairly comprehensive development around them, being incorporated after considerable rebuilding around 2014 into a modern office development.
The listing text decribes them as part of a group with the “King’s Cross Gasholders, Goods Way and Barlow’s great shed to St Pancras Station, Euston Road” and “in addition an important part of a dramatic Victorian industrial landscape.” Unfortunately this is no longer the case, and it is now simply an addendum to a modern development.
Here and in the next picture we see a landscape and portrait view of a nearby part of that “dramatic Victorian industrial landscape”, now gone and replaced by modern blocks
I made the landscape format view first, but then decided that it was probably better to include the top of the gasholder.
The German Gymnasium on the south side of Clarence Passage was also built in 1964-5, paid for by the German Gymnastics Society and London’s German community and it had its front entrance on Pancras Road. It was one of the first venues used by the National Olympian Association for its first games in 1866.
My favourite mural in London, on the side of this block of flats. I don’t know when this disappeared. The ‘preserved’ building has a huge featureless brick wall facing Pancras Road which could do with something like this to liven it up.
Although this building was Grade II listed in 1976, part of its western end was demolished for the construction of St Pancras International, with a new end wall being built in matching fashion. The building is now in use as a restaurant and bar.
I had wandered here to the side of the Motorail terminal at King Cross, where you used to be able to drive your car onto a train and sleep in a bunk bed all the way to Edinburgh or Aberdeen. This was the first such service, I think dating from the 1950s by British Rail, who set it up as Car Sleeper Limited, but it was soon joined by a network of similar services serving other stations and distant destinations, with London terminals at Olympia, Paddington and Euston.
As the motorway network grew, demand for motorail decreased, and I think the service from Kings Cross ended around the time I made this picture.
Another image from somewhere around the north of King’s Cross Station where I had wandered.
Back on Pancras Rd I walked to the eastern side of the Great Northern Hotel facing King’s Cross Station to take this picture of the main facade. The area in front of the hotel is now covered by the extended station building from 2008. The building was a part of Lewis Cubitt’s plans for the station, built in 1854 and Grade II listed in 1984. The slightly less impressive convex rear of the building is still fully visible on Pancras Rd.
This rather threadbare beast was for some years a feature of Pancras Road, and although I’ve called it an Ox I think it was really a Bison. I think it was there simply to draw attention to the shop behind, or perhaps just to make it easier to find. Perhaps someone will be able to post more about it in a comment?
A short distance down the road was the Underground entrance at which my walk ended and my journey home began.
The first post on this walk was Kings Cross, St George’s Gardens & More