Gothic Revival

By Amy Mason Doan
Photo above by Colin Willoughby/C/W Photographic

“There is no other building, in London or anywhere else, that embodies more precisely the achievement of mid-Victorian Britain. It reflects the skill, boldness, and certainty of the mid-Victorian engineer.”

The building described by historian Jack Simmons is St. Pancras railway station, which upon its completion in 1868 became the largest enclosed structure in the world. It has long since given up that title, but its massive arched roof and ornate brick front are still a treasured sight to Londoners.

Rail Link Engineering, a Bechtel-led consortium, is helping transform the stately old building for its modern role as the London terminus of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, the UK’s first high-speed rail line. The first section of the CTRL, from the Channel Tunnel to North Kent, opened in 2003. Work is proceeding on Section 2 from North Kent into London (see Detail Design ).

Just as it did in the 19th century, work on St. Pancras demands the highest level of project design, construction, and management. The station has multiple levels, is located in bustling North London, and thousands of commuters rely on its trains. And because St. Pancras is a “Grade 1 Listed,” or historic building, every last brick must complement the original architecture.

“This type of project is the reason I became an engineer,” says Ailie MacAdam, project manager for the St. Pancras renovation. “We are transforming a 150-year-old, underutilized, crumbling station into a state-of-the-art international transportation terminal that hopefully will last another 150 years.”

Midland Railway built the station in the 1860s to help it transport coal and beer. To maximize the volume of uninterrupted space, Midland’s directors selected a bold single-span roof design by engineer William Henry Barlow. The station would be the largest structure of its type, with a roof spanning 74 meters.

For the station hotel in front of the train shed, the board picked a Gothic revival design by George Gilbert Scott, the closest thing Victorian London had to a Frank Gehry-style celebrity architect. With a price tag of £315,000, his drawings were much more expensive than any others considered, but the company wanted St. Pancras to outshine existing stations like King’s Cross and Paddington. The station’s final cost, including shed and hotel, was about £1 million.

Since it was completed 137 years ago, St. Pancras has survived the birth of the automobile, World War II air raids, and an appointment with the wrecking ball in the 1960s. (The station was within days of demolition before a last-minute effort to preserve it succeeded.) High-speed rail might have finally razed St. Pancras, but instead it is giving the station new life as the grand London hub for 300-kilometer-per-hour Eurostar trains to Paris and Brussels via the Channel Tunnel.

The finished station’s capacity will increase from six to 13 raised platforms, with a sleek international departure lounge for Eurostar passengers on the lower level. Three platforms are reserved for high-speed lines into North Kent.

The first step was the two-year construction of a 200-meter eastern extension, which began in 2002. When the eastern deck was completed in April 2004, Midland Mainline’s rail service was temporarily moved there so that work could begin on the old front building and the Barlow Train Shed.

The job is a complicated fusion of many different tasks—delicate reconstruction, cleaning, complete teardowns, and building from scratch. Wherever possible, the original materials are preserved. The old train deck has been removed but its metal works have been saved. Barlow House, the original brick and stone ticket hall, has also been repaired.

Parts of the parapet, chimneys, and brick facade were impossible to save. But they are being recreated to precise English Heritage specifications, and many building materials, such as the Welsh slate for the restored roof and the Ketton and Ancaster stones on the interior and exterior, are from the same quarries as the original stone.

Because Eurostars are 200 meters longer than standard trains, the project calls for a major extension to the station’s Barlow Train Shed. Parts of the roof’s original glazing had been damaged over the years and replaced by cheaper corrugated metal sheeting, which made the interior look bleak. To let in more natural light, glazing (replicating the original) is being restored across the central third of the roof.

While work proceeds above, crews are simultaneously building an international departure lounge and customs offices in the station’s undercroft, the “crypt” that is actually six meters above street level.

Reinventing the undercroft has proven to be one of the most challenging aspects of the project from both design and staging standpoints. The undercroft has many old and new building elements, such as 1868 cast iron columns and the 2005 train deck above them, which must be joined perfectly to form a stable structure that also supports the arched roof. The need for crews to work simultaneously on multiple levels also demands extra safety precautions and precise planning.

The team has finished lowering the original undercroft floor to the bottom of the column foundations and completed construction of the new floor. Cast iron columns and wrought iron girders have been pressure-cleaned and painted. During the next stage of the undercroft buildout, ventilation ducts and service passages will be built. To give the international lounge the same airy feeling as the upper platforms, large light wells will be cut into the undercroft ceiling.

The other major “downstairs” project involved building an underground box structure within the tunnel for the Bedford-Brighton Thameslink rail line, which will replace the nearby Thameslink station at King’s Cross. The excavation for the station box had to be completed under an extremely tight deadline. Thameslink trains were stopped on either side of the station for 35 weeks beginning in September 2004. During that time, more than 80,000 cubic meters of material had to be excavated before the new tunnel floor and station platforms could go in.

The project has hit all critical planned milestones so far. Over the next two years, the team will tackle the western deck expansion, signaling, track alignment, and retail fitouts.

Once the entire CTRL is open, high-speed Eurostar trains will travel from London to Paris in two hours and 15 minutes, and from London to Brussels in under two hours. Then, St. Pancras will officially go from crumbling to cutting-edge.

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