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Most people hurry through King’s Cross on the Underground without even surfacing but with the arrival of the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras in 2006, this long-neglected and rundown district looks set to get the transformation it deserves. Even the unlovely Euston Road has cleaned up its act in recent years. The opening of the state-of-the-art British Library here represented the first bold public statement of government confidence in an area that now looks set to boom. Meanwhile on Friday and Saturday nights the Scala and the marshalling yards north of the stations are still a Mecca for clubbers, injecting a dose of wide-eyed and healthy nightlife into one of the city’s most desolate backyards.
Sights
British Library
96 Euston Rd, T 020-7412 7332, http://www.bl.uk. 0930-1800 Mon, Wed, Thu, Fri; 0930-2000 Tue; 0930-1700 Sat; 1100-1700 Sun. Free. M King’s Cross St Pancras.
Whatever people have made of the exterior, with its straight lines of plain red brick and dark green trim offset by its splendid neo-Gothic Victorian neighbour, St Pancras station, the interior of the nation’s reference library has provoked few complaints. Cool acres of white stone and careful attention to details, such as the handrails, the spacing of the steps and the diffusion of light, all combine to make the building a joy to use. Anyone engaged in research can apply for free membership to gain access to the reading rooms and some 18 million volumes (the library receives a copy of just about every publication copyrighted in the UK), while the two permanent exhibitions (that can be seen without a pass) are also well worth a visit. The Treasures Gallery is a beautiful and carefully explained display of precious books and manuscripts: the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospel from around 700AD; a copy of the Magna Carta of 1215; the Sherborne Missal – the only painted book in England to have survived the Reformation; Shakespeare’s First Folio from 1623; and many other manuscripts of great authors.
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