Category Archives: Transports of Delight

STEAMed up

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STEAM – the Museum of the Great Western Railway, Swindon, Wiltshire

STEAM – the Museum of the Great Western Railway, Swindon, Wiltshire

If you must drive, don’t go to Swindon.  Just don’t go there.  Get someone who already lives there to come out and fetch you.

The place is a nightmare of bad signage and confusing road layouts.  It’s the location of the notorious Magic Roundabout, designed by Frank Blackmore, claimed to be safer than any alternative because drivers are so terrified they go slowly:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon).

The sensible way to reach Swindon is, of course, by train.

Walk from the station to the surviving Railway Village, built in the early years of the Great Western Railway as a company town, New Swindon, alongside the line and the works, away from the original market town, Old Swindon.

The rows of terraced houses, with gardens, are now carefully looked after, unlike the desperately neglected, historically important Mechanics’ Institute (1855;  extended 1892) [http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content/image_galleries/swindon_mechanics_institute_gallery.shtml?1, http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=41501 and http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=3228].

Walking through the subway under the railway tracks into the area that was the great railway works is a poignant experience.  On the other side of the tracks, sturdy stone buildings from the days of Gooch, Dean and Churchward stand alongside modern structures with names such as ‘Heritage Plaza’.  Some of the site is occupied by those great wealth-generators, English Heritage and the National Trust.  Walk through the door of one building and you’re immediately in the midst of John Lewis’ furniture department:  this is the Swindon Designer Outlet [http://www.swindondesigneroutlet.com], which has the GWR locomotive 7918 Hinton Manor as a backdrop to the food court.

Across the way, STEAM – the Museum of the Great Western Railway [http://www.steam-museum.org.uk] is superb, capturing the noise and busy-ness of the great works in a restricted space, and telling its story with breadth and wit.  It’s a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours, with plenty to occupy children and big kids.  I worked the signals and points to let the Royal Train past, because there was too much of a queue to drive an engine.

That said, there’s nothing much to eat inside the Museum, though there is a National Trust café, more department-store than country-house, in Heelis, their headquarters across the way which is named after the author Beatrix Potter, Mrs William Heelis:  [Heelis | National Trust head office | National Trust].

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

By rail across the Southern Alps

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Arthur's Pass, South Island, New Zealand: approach to Otira Tunnel

Arthur’s Pass, South Island, New Zealand: approach to Otira Tunnel

The TranzAlpine train-journey across the breadth of New Zealand’s South Island from Christchurch to Greymouth is not cheap, and it’s worth every cent.  Parts of the journey are spectacular, and the 4½-hour journey unfolds a variety of landscape across the divide between the dry eastern plains and mountains to the tropical, rainy west of the country.  The Midland Line depends heavily on its coal traffic.  The lengthy and heavily engineered route couldn’t possibly survive solely on passengers.

The most exciting part of the route traverses the Waimakariri and Broken River gorges through a series of tunnels and vertiginous viaducts including the Stair Case Viaduct, 240 feet high [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TranzAlpine_bridge_by_Waimakariri_River.JPG].

The line climbs continuously to Arthur’s Pass (population 54), in the heart of the aptly-named Southern Alps, and plunges downgrade into the Otira Tunnel, 5.3 miles long, with a gradient of 1 in 33.  Built between 1907 and 1923, this was originally only workable by electric locomotives;  since 1997 trains have been diesel-hauled with a system of airtight doors and fans at the tunnel mouths to enable trains to expel their foul air.

The line skirts Lake Brunner, itself strongly reminiscent of the European Alps, and terminates at Greymouth.  This is the nearest large town to the Pike River Mine, where 29 miners were killed in explosions in November 2010.

The long main street is well geared to the daily one-hour influx of tourist train-passengers, and provides coach links to places along the coast that might once have been rail-connected.
 
Since I rode in February 2011, the odd-looking yet extremely comfortable 1950s TranzAlpine rolling-stock has been replaced by new ‘AK’ panoramic sightseeing stock.  New Zealand railways run on 3ft 6in-guage, so the carriages, rebuilt from older stock, are compact, yet there’s room for two seats each side of a central aisle and more than adequate leg-room.  The rear coach is an enclosed observation car.

In the middle of the rake is a generator car, with viewing platforms at each end for fresh air and photographers.  A further observation platform, with less panoramic views, is built into the end of the baggage car.  As the train approaches the major viaducts these areas become a species of genteel, geriatric cage-fighting.

The on-board team-members are friendly and eager to please, and service is excellent – plenty of food and drink to purchase, pauses for fresh air at major stops and an informative, well-scripted commentary.  (I’m fully tuned to the New Zealand habit of turning most vowels to a short ‘i’, but one young man on the TranzAlpine insisted on turning the ‘i’-vowels to apostrophes, describing the route as the “M’dln’d Line” and referring to “licim’ves” and “trick m’nance crews”.)

The central Christchurch rail terminal, opened in 1960 [http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Heritage/Photos/Disc10/img0041.asp], was sold off in the 1980s and demolished after the February 2011 earthquake, and the present rail station for South Island’s largest city is a one-platform affair in an industrial estate, a ten-minute drive from the centre.

My hotel promoted a so-called complimentary station shuttle.  There is no such thing.  Only at the end of the spectacularly relaxed journey out to the train does the driver reveal that it costs NZ$6 to return at the end of the day – the oldest con-trick in transport history.  The alternative taxi no doubt costs more, but nevertheless I didn’t like the feeling of being taken for a ride.

A detailed description of the route and advice about booking the TranzAlpine from outside New Zealand is at http://www.seat61.com/TranzAlpine.htm.

 

One notch after another

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Ultimate Driving Experience, National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire

My friend John from the Isle of Man had the time of his life learning to drive a tram at the National Tramway Museum, Crich.

The Ultimate Tram Driving Experience was a retirement present from his colleagues.  I had the privilege of being the photographer, which brought with it the challenge of working out how to capture someone driving a moving vehicle fitted with a windscreen.

John was superbly looked after from start to finish by his instructors Nigel and Paul.  Paul is a superlative driving instructor, and Nigel (nominally the conductor) kept us interested and informed and patiently answered our questions throughout the day.

The day starts, over a cup of coffee, with classroom instruction.  John needed to know one end of a tram from the other, as it were, and to be aware of the safety requirements of steering fifteen tons of tram along predestinate grooves.  (Nigel told us that a recent visitor actually asked him how you steer a tram.)

John’s chosen Blackpool tram was in the sick bay, so he was given a huge, bosomy Liverpool “Green Goddess”, a shiny powerful beast that hadn’t been out of the depot for some weeks and took a certain amount of getting going.  At one point we had to call the Crich equivalent of the AA when 869 mysteriously parked itself on the main line and refused to budge.

I was grateful to be allowed to listen in on the entire day so that I learnt a lot that I’d never realised about these ponderous vehicles.

The technology, for instance, is at once simple and complicated;  the machinery is both robust and extremely delicate.  Six hundred volts moving from wire to rail through a wood, steel and glass double-deck vehicle is not to be messed with.  Direct current behaves in a different way to the alternating current we use at home.

If you treat the tram properly, John was told, it’s really quite easy to move;  if you’re uncertain, there can be smoke and bangs and flashes – and you can cause damage that takes time and money to put right.  It very rarely happens.

I learned, watching and listening to Paul’s meticulous instruction and encouragement, that driving a tram is much more about coasting and momentum than I’d imagined.  As with a car, you keep your foot off the throttle as much as you can.

Making it move is one thing;  stopping it is another.  This is why the regular Crich tram-drivers have one or more of seven different licences, largely because of the variety of braking systems in the historic fleet.

We were hospitably received by this exceptionally professional museum – coffee in the morning, lunch, and then more coffee at the end of the day, constant friendly attention, the run of the museum both on foot and in our own big green tram.  We arrived at 10 am and left at 5 pm, and Paul and Nigel showed no haste to see us off.

I know more about trams and Crich than I’d have learned any other way, and – thanks to his former colleagues – John has another skill to add to his CV.

Carriage building turned to a fine art

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Fine Art Building, Chicago

Fine Art Building, Chicago

Just as Chester’s central library incorporates a fine example of early automobile architecture, so Chicago’s Fine Art Building is based on the Studebaker Carriage Works of 1884-5.

The five Studebaker brothers started out in the 1850s building wagons for the military, for the California gold rush and for those pioneers’ covered wagon-trains that figured in a landmark 1960s television series.

Gradually they extended their repertoire to more genteel passenger carriages.  Their works was at South Bend, Indiana, and in 1884 they opened their showroom, designed by Solon Spencer Beman, at 410 South Michigan Avenue in central Chicago.  It was designed to receive carriages in kit-form, which were lifted to the upper storeys in small pieces and then assembled floor by floor until they reached the ground-floor showroom where they could be sold and immediately trundled out on to the street.

Chicago’s birth as a cultural centre grew from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, celebrating the quatercentenary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World.  In the afterglow of the World’s Fair, as it’s more commonly known, the Studebaker building, which stands in the same block as the Auditorium Building of 1889-90, was adapted in 1898 as a centre for artists of all kinds, and it continues today as a venue for painters, musicians, dancers and designers – http://www.fineartsbuilding.tv/directory.html.

The adaption included two auditoria, the Studebaker Theater and the smaller Playhouse Theater, both of which were earmarked for restoration some years ago:  http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2008/08/historic-studeb.html.

During the 1898 renovation a series of murals by Martha Baker, Charles Francis Browne, Frederic Clay-Bartlett, Oliver Dennett Grover, Frank X Leyendecker and Bertha Menzler-Peyton were installed on the tenth floor.  Take the ancient lift, and enjoy the sounds of the resident musicians going about their daily work.

The Fine Art Building provides regular events for the public:  see http://www.fineartsbuilding.tv/events.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Windy City:  the architecture of Chicago’ please click here.

 

Horseless garage

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Cavendish Buildings, West Street, Sheffield

Cavendish Buildings, West Street, Sheffield

It’s remarkable how much built history is literally invisible.

Among John Minnis’ slides when he talked to the Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group about ‘Early Automobile Architecture’ was one image of my native Sheffield that made me double-take.

John knows Sheffield because he co-authored the Pevsner Architectural Guide on the city.

He pointed out Cavendish Buildings on West Street as an example of an early purpose-built motor-sales and repair shop.  I thought it was a wine-bar, until I remembered that it used to belong to the Kenning Motor Group.  In fact, I once hired a car there.

Cavendish Buildings has a very fine, imposing terra-cotta façade, obviously designed in one piece but actually, by the date-stones on the semi-circular pediments, built in three stages, 1907, 1910 and 1919.

It was built for the Sheffield Motor Company Ltd with, according to Ruth Harman and John Minnis’ guide, showrooms at street level and, on the upper stories, one of those repositories of misspent youth, a billiard hall.

Contributors to the history forum http://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=5408 relate that during the Second World War part of the upper level was occupied by the apparently lively Central Labour Working Men’s Club, and later the space was used by the Cavendish Dance Studio.

Until at least the 1970s there was a car hoist within the building, presumably serving repair shops on the first floor.  To passers-by, of course, its original use had long been forgotten.

Now you can eat and drink at the Cavendish:  http://www.screampubs.co.uk/thecavendishsheffield – even if you don’t qualify for student ID.

And you can see it in 3D at http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=6a8d33f318df7d744522e2cc67bda51&ct=mdsa.

Amazing.

Future meetings of the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group are advertised at http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/south-yorkshire/forthcoming-events.  Guests are welcome.  The biscuits are excellent.

 

Tram terminus

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Blackpool North Shore (2008)

Blackpool North Shore (2008)

I had occasion to drive the length of the Flyde coast from Fleetwood to Lytham in the summer of 2011, and discovered – as any tram enthusiast could have told me – that major changes were afoot on the Blackpool tramway.

The line from Fleetwood to Little Bispham was in a state of upheaval, and there were no trams south of Pleasure Beach.  The entire line from Starr Gate to Fleetwood was upgraded to a modern light-rail system, with sixteen brand-new low-floor vehicles, built by that great British rolling-stock builder Bombardier, operating out of a brand new depot.:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-12151400]

That means that the summer of 2011, until the end of the Illuminations on November 6th, was the very last time a public-service tramway will operate in Britain with technology that is essentially Victorian.

Blackpool’s proud history of electric trams back to 1885 encompasses a traditional first-generation tram system which was comprehensively upgraded from 1932 when the transport manager, Walter Luff, introduced a fleet of streamlined luxury vehicles, in four different models, alongside a parallel fleet of streamlined centre-entrance buses.

When all other mainland British electric tramways were replaced by diesel buses after the Second World War, Blackpool still needed the promenade trams because there was no other practicable way of shifting the crowds that visit Blackpool for the Illuminations.

Over decades the system has struggled on, rebuilding 1930s trams in various guises, buying in one-off designs from the local bus manufacturer and patching the track and overhead time and time again.

Eventually, in 2008, a package was agreed between local, national and European authorities to convert the tramway to the standards now familiar in Manchester, Sheffield, Croydon, Nottingham and Edinburgh.

In Blackpool the heritage fleet, as it is now called, continues – discreetly modified to comply with the new traffic signalling, operating out of the original depot at Rigby Road.

But when the older cars are trundled out it’s for show.

This was the very last time, after a century and a quarter, that ordinary passengers clambered aboard traditional British tramcars to go to work, to shop or to get home.

In the 1880s the borough first introduced electric trams and electric street lighting:  then and now Blackpool’s civic motto is “Progess”.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Essentially Victorian Blackpool

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Blackpool Promenade (2003)

Blackpool Promenade (2003)

When I last stayed in Blackpool for a birthday celebration we took a walk along the North Pier at dusk.  On the way back to the promenade I ended up in conversation with two siblings, Richard, who was twelve but looked sixteen and had lost a tooth in a rugby match, and Natalie, eighteen, who was about to read medieval history at a university of her choice.

Natalie, who’s grown up down south and whose immediate family usually holidays abroad, was fascinated by the unfamiliarity of being in the great working-class resort of the north-west.  I pointed out that the Tower is a vertical pier – sturdy engineering topped with a fairy-tale structure five hundred feet above the sea.  When it opened in 1894 anybody with a few pence in their pocket could stand nearly five hundred feet in the air, an experience otherwise only accessible by balloon.

When we returned to the promenade a tram glided past, one of those huge double-deckers gleaming with light.  I mentioned that Blackpool had one of the first electric street tramways in the world, dating back to 1885.  At least as important, in historical terms, is the fact that the Corporation tramway department pioneered the development of Blackpool’s greatest stroke of municipal acumen.

To mark a royal visit in 1912, the tramway electricians were asked to festoon the promenade with coloured lamps, which drew so many extra visitors that from 1913 onwards, interrupted only by two wars and the General Strike, the Illuminations, as they were called, extended the Blackpool season by anything up to two months, adding to the prosperity of landladies, hoteliers and shopkeepers, enhancing the profits of the railway companies and subsidising the municipal rates from the increased profits of the trams themselves.

It made practical sense, during the busy summer season, for tram engineers to work on the Illuminations, while all their vehicles were needed on the road, and the autumn visitors kept the trams busy to the end of October.  Eventually, a separate Corporation department was established to run the Illuminations, and until the establishment of the National Grid, Blackpool had to buy additional power from Preston Corporation, because their own generating works couldn’t cope with the extra load.

As I pointed out to Natalie, when people go to see the Blackpool Illuminations, they’re doing something essentially Victorian – admiring electricity.

Details of this year’s Illuminations are at http://www.blackpool-illuminations.net.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Christchurch by bus

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London Transport RTL68, operated by Hassle-free Tours, Christchurch, New Zealand, February 2011

London Transport RTL68, operated by Hassle-free Tours, Christchurch, New Zealand, February 2011

I wrote this piece while I was staying in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the week before the February 2011 earthquake.

On my first morning in Christchurch I spotted the familiar and unmistakable shape of a London Transport red double-decker, and booked a tour that afternoon.  My friend Doug, who likes buses, would have been miffed not to ride on the roof-box RTL that I’d seen;  I rode in a common-or-garden Routemaster, but I’m easy to please and a red bus is a red bus.  I’m only concerned that it has a top deck and windows that open in hot weather.

The conductor, for so he called himself though he didn’t ring the bell or shout “Hold tight”, was Paul, who quickly entered my pantheon of tour-guides I wish to emulate.  He was adept at the fortissimo bonhomie required by cruise-groups and loud American ladies who chirp and squawk fit to drown the PA system.  When they stopped talking and listened it was quickly apparent that Paul knew his way round Christchurch, and that his presentation was as sharp as a pin.  He could fill in time when stuck in traffic, yet never missed a cue to point out sites, and if he said look left he meant left not right.

The bus company is aptly named Hassle-free Tours [Christchurch Double Decker City Tour – Hassle-free Tours (hasslefreetours.co.nz)].  The logo and web-address on the side panels of the Routemaster use the elegant, authentic London Transport Johnston font.  It’s a quality outfit:  the entire fleet runs on biodiesel fuel from restaurant cooking-oil.

As an introduction to Christchurch the itinerary was ideal – a quick spin round the city centre for orientation, a walk in the park to Mona Vale Mansion (designed by Joseph Clarkson Maddison 1899-1900), a walk in another park to Riccarton House (1856 onwards) and the transplanted Deans Cottage, the successive homes of the Deans family who first settled the site of Christchurch, and a look at the Riccarton Bush, a preserved area of the vegetation that filled the Canterbury Plain before the Deans tamed it, now used as a kiwi nursery.

Then the bus headed out of town for an ice-cream at the seaside resort of Sumner – Christchurch’s answer to Bondi Beach (though no-one with sense would surf around Cave Rock).

And then Steve the driver came into his own as the bus crawled up the precipitous road over the Port Hills to the port of Lyttelton, where cruise liners sit alongside the wharves from which west-coast coal is loaded for shipping to China, Japan and South Korea.

There’s no finer introduction to Christchurch and its surroundings than the precipitous ride back over Mount Pleasant Road, savouring the views from the top deck of a vehicle built to chug down Oxford Street, driven with care and precision and much horn-sounding on the hairpin bends by Steve.

High-speed designer

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Sheffield Midland Station (1985): British Rail High Speed Train 253 001

It’s an interesting challenge to name ten modern British designers – almost as difficult as naming ten modern British engineers or, notoriously, ten famous Belgians http://www.famousbelgians.net.

One of the greatest modern British designers was Kenneth Grange (1929-2024).  His first major commission was the original British parking-meter, now a rare artefact, in 1958.  He went on to design the Kenwood Chef food-mixer, the Kodak Instamatic camera (1968), the Adshel bus-shelter (1993) – another great British bus-shelter designer was the late David Mellor (1930-2009) – and an acclaimed new version of the London black taxi (1997).

Kenneth Grange’s own favourite was the biggest of all his designs – the InterCity 125 High Speed Train, introduced by British Railways in the early 1970s.  He didn’t engineer the entire train;  indeed, he was originally commissioned only to design the livery, but as he explained to Rachel Cooke [The Observer, July 17th 2011], “…I decided to have a go at the aerodynamics, testing it in wind tunnels with the help of an engineer I was employing.  I showed it to [the British Railway Board] with some trepidation.  It was a bloody nerve, to be honest…But they weren’t difficult to persuade in the end because the argument was sound:  the design made the train more efficient.”  It’s instructive to compare the prototype with Kenneth Grange’s more familiar production model, illustrated above.

Over the years, train passengers took the HST for granted:  after all, it’s still in limited service, upgraded, re-engined, rebadged, and still going strong.  Some operators have replaced it with newer models, not all of them fully satisfactory, while others have indicated that with further modifications these trains could run until at least 2035 when they will be approaching sixty years old.

The High Speed Train is a credit to British engineering:  the prototype broke the world speed record for diesel traction (143 mph) which is now held by a production-version HST (148 mph).  Introducing the HST to the Western and East Coast main-lines and other routes in the late 1970s and early 1980s significantly increased passenger numbers and pushed up house-prices in such towns as Reading, Swindon, Huntingdon and Peterborough.

The design was exported to Australia as the basis for the XPT train, introduced in 1982 and still operating on five routes out of Sydney.  It’s oddly reassuring for a Brit to stand on an Australian station platform as one of these instantly recognisable beasts glides in.

Back home, its proudest passenger was its long-lived designer, who travelled on HSTs regularly from his home in Devon to work in London.  He featured in this BBC News clip celebrating forty years of HST operation:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/36188805.

Kenneth Grange was awarded a knighthood in the 2013 New Year Honours.  He died on July 21st 2024, a few days after his ninety-fifth birthday.  He designed his own coffin.

Midland Grand renaissance

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Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras: grand staircase (1977)

Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras: grand staircase (1977)

St Pancras Renaissance Hotel: grand staircase (2011)

How very satisfying to see the former Midland Grand Hotel finally restored and fully operational as the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, which opened in May 2011.

And what a pleasure to be shown round by the Hotel Historian, Royden Stock.  Royden has been associated with the building throughout its recent restoration, and has an unrivalled archaeological knowledge of the building.

I learnt from him, for instance, that English Heritage insistence that the grand staircase should be restored to its 1901 decoration, red with gold fleur-de-lis, obscures the much lighter original scheme, cream with a dado rail and scroll decoration to echo Skidmore’s ironwork.

He also reports that what were thought to be iron spandrels underneath the stair-treads are in fact fibrous plaster, which makes me wonder whether George Gilbert Scott would ever sanction such deceit, or whether they too date from 1901.

There is, oddly, no photograph of the staircase dating before 1901.

The original stair carpet was, unsurprisingly, unusable and a sample length woven to the original colours proved wildly garish because it was designed for the original cream colour-scheme, so the fitted carpet that stretches three floors up and down the staircase and reappears elsewhere in the building is newly woven to the faded colours of the original.

There’s an inevitable tension in taking a historic tour of a working hotel.  Royden Stock is adept at circumnavigating ongoing events to show visitors on any particular day as much of the building as possible.  He can’t, of course, provide access to the private apartments on the Euston Road wing of the building.  The smart advice, from a man who ought to know, is that tours booked at the weekend are likely to be more comprehensive than those in the middle of the week.

The refreshments at the end of the tour were worth waiting for, though the service was several stars short of the Renaissance aspiration, perhaps because the hotel was extremely busy on the day I visited.  Some members of my group were put out by this, but I considered Royden’s guiding alone was worth £20, and to me the pot of tea and an empty croissant was incidental – welcome, but not serious hospitality.

I hope Royden writes a book about St Pancras.  His knowledge will add greatly to the existing literature on the station and the hotel.

Tours of St Pancras can be booked at www.stpancrasrenaissance.co.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture on St Pancras Station and the Midland Grand Hotel please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.