Later this year, November 14th to be exact, the Eurostar will be opening its new St Pancras station in Kings Cross, London. While the opening of a new station may not seem much to shout about, it coincides with the launch of faster rail lines, making Eurostar journeys to mainland Europe about 30 minutes shorter, which is something to get excited about.
Last weekend, Eurostar ran its first train from Brussels into St Pancras International, London. The trip took 1 hour and 43 minutes and set a new record for the London-Brussels route. The London-Paris route will only take 2 hours and 15 minutes and as someone who has taken the trip several times, the 30 minutes off will make a difference.
When it was announced a few years ago that the Eurostar would be moving its London station from Waterloo to St Pancras, I was fairly disappointed. As someone who traveled to Paris regularly and lived in South London, it was incredibly convenient for me that Eurostar was based at Waterloo. Waterloo Station is very central and has a number of national trains and tube lines. Also, since the Eurostar opened there, money has been poured into the area, making it safer and more appealing to tourists. The regeneration of the area has coincided with a major makeover of the South Bank, which is now a wonderful area to visit.
Kings Cross isn’t the most welcoming, for lack of a better word, area of London. The goal is for the new Eurostar terminal to have the same effect on the Kings Cross area as it has on the South Bank. However, Eurostar has also been spinning the move to St Pancras as a means of making it easier for tourists to travel into central London or onwards on arrival. This is hard to believe since Waterloo was in walking distance of the city’s center. You can’t really get more central than that.
Of course, I suspect that I will be eating my words in a few years. An estimated £10.5 billion (~US$21 Bln) is to be poured into the local area and hopefully St Pancras-Kings Cross area will lose its grungy feel. And St Pancras is a beautiful station, with 18,000 individual panes of glass in the ceiling and ironwork arches, making it spacious and light. The new Eurostar terminal is to have 95-meter long champagne bar, making it the longest in Europe, which I’m sure will be put to good use.
Oh, and for all you Harry Potter fans out there, St Pancras is where they filmed the 9¾ platform shots in the Harry Potter movies. So there’s something for everybody to see.