St. Pancras International, London

February 5, 2008

   Travelers arriving at London’s St. Pancras International train terminus, opened by Queen Elizabeth II last November after an £800 million ($1.59 billion) restoration project, are sure to be impressed by the speed (186 mph) of new-generation Eurostar rail link from either Paris or Brussels.
   They’ll be even more-impressed when they alight onto the platform and get their first glimpse of the newly refurbished Gothic station.
   Above them is the arch of William Barlow’s train shed, opened in 1868 and – at more than 240’ wide and 690’ long –still the largest single span of cast ironwork in the world. Freshly painted pale blue in honor of the sky above, it supports the re-glazed clear canopy and soars up to 107’ above the platform.
   At the end of the platform rises a glorious confection of red brick, cream limestones and red sandstone spread across a series of banded arches with heavy capitals and decorated courses, and cathedral-inspired stone windows framed with Scottish pink granite pillars. All this is bordered with geometric ceramic tiles and cast-iron fringes where it connects to the Barlow canopy.
   The structure is the back of Sir George Gilbert Scott’s flamboyant Midland Grand Hotel, which, after its £150 million ($294 million) restoration, will reopen next year as a Manhattan Loft Company apartment complex and five-star Marriott Renaissance Hotel.
   Its façade overlooks the busy Euston Road and is even more-extravagant in architecture and use of stone and brick than its train-side view.
   With its elaborate sandstone oriel windows, pink granite and limestone balustrades, sweeping Welsh slate roof and three fairytale castle towers bedecked in stonemasonry art, it’s no wonder St. Pancras has long been one of Londoners’ most-popular landmarks.
   St. Pancras almost didn’t make it to old age. The Midland Grand Hotel closed in 1935, and plans in the mid-1960s called for complete demolition of the station.
   Only 10 days before the scheduled razing, public protests saved the structure with designation (or, in U.K. terms, listing) as a historic structure though English Heritage, the government-funded organization responsible for the country’s historic structures.
   However, no economical use could be found for it. It continued to languish, empty and derelict and covered in 100 years’ of city soot and grime, for nearly four more decades.
   The building, however, recently found a new life as a replacement for Waterloo Station as the western end of Eurostar, a high-speed railroad linking London with Brussels and Paris.
   The old St. Pancras Station served originally as the terminus for the Midland Railway, and saw trains and goods wagons arriving from the English industrial-heartland cities of Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield. Among those goods were the materials used in the construction of the station and its attached hotel.
   Restoring the hotel to its former grandeur and upgrading the station took nearly a decade. The control and conservation ethos of English Heritage dictated that much of the original stonework be retained. Even so, some 750 tons of fresh stone was used by stone contractors Stonewest Ltd. in their £5 million ($9.8 million) part of the project.
   St. Pancras’ original construction used three main types of stone, two of which were available for the restoration.
   Most of the limestone originally used was Ancaster Hard White from a quarry on the borderlands of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire counties. This stone is still available and sourced for replacement works on the inside of the station. Another available Lincolnshire limestone, Ketton Freestone, went into exterior work.
   The third stone used in the original build, Red Mansfield sandstone from Nottinghamshire, is no longer available. Testing confirmed that Corsehill sandstone from southwest Scotland provided the best match.
   Throughout the restoration project, the stone contractors, led by Associate Director Barry McCarthy, kept coming across isolated pieces of other stones.
   “Often this was Yorkstone sandstone being used for thresholds,” he says. “And every time we found something else, we would source it, get it approved by the architects, consultants and the main contractor, and make a record of the stone used for the repair added to the Material Profile Record.”
   Anything alien to the original structure – even closed-circuit-television camera mountings – had to be designed in heritage materials. Replacement and additional bricks (the latter used on a 60m (196.8’) stretch of arcaded stone and brickwork that runs back from Euston Road) had to be made and laid by specialists at a cost of up to £30 ($58.85) per single shaped brick.
   The polished columns found throughout the project, made of Peterhead Granite from Scotland, survived the station’s fallow years and needed no attention. The roofs are re-covered with Welsh slates from the quarries of Alfred McAlpine plc in North Wales. (Editor’s note: Since the St. Pancras work, Alfred McAlpine sold the quarries to Carillion plc.)
   Stonewest had more than 90 workers and 13 management staff on the stonework project. By the time they came on-site, taking over from another contractor who quit the project, they had only 18 months to carry out the masonry work; the deadline dictated the large team, including so many managers.
   “There was a lot of reporting,” McCarthy says. “There needed to be. At the peak there were 2,000 people working across the entire station site.”
   They also set up 25 “banker” (carver/shaper) masons on-site, complete with pneumatic tools and dust-extraction equipment, because much of the stone had to be brought in sawn-six-sides and worked on-site to match the existing work.
   “When the station was first built, there must have been hundreds of masons here and they all did slightly different work,” McCarthy explains. “You can see the result when you study the external arches; they vary enormously.
   “So, we had to make individual profiles for individual stones to match that work. We were using the old skills.”
   Because of the large number of masons on site for such a long period, Stonewest also brought their trainees in to hone their skills alongside the skilled craftsmen.
    “We chose a mentor for each of them to work with,” McCarthy says. “They worked day-in, day-out with that person. They were never on their own.”
   Part of Stonewest’s contribution was to build 15 new brick and stone archways to the west side of the station and four to the east side; these had to match the original construction.
   To create new openings they had to break through 900mm (35.4”) solid brick walls using steel arch formers to hold the masonry up rather than needles (roof bolts). Because of the sensitive nature of the project, they didn’t want to make holes in the masonry of the walls above the arches.
   “In some instances,” McCarthy says, “we haven’t touched a single brick above the arches. Stones weighing half-a-ton had to be pushed in from the front. The biggest stone was almost a meter long.”
   The original facing bricks have the name of makers Tucker & Gripper written on them. Those used in the restoration were from Charnwood and Ibstock and for the arches Stonewest used “red rubbers” from Bulmer Brick and Tile Co.
   The “rubber” bricks get their unusual name because they can be rubbed into shape with abrasives, since they don’t have the fire skin that provides the waterproof quality of a normal modern day brick.
   Stonemasons had to shape the bricks on-site, as well as the Ancaster Stone with which they are interspersed on the voussoirs, because the requirement was for just 1mm joints, like the originals. That level of accuracy isn’t possible in manufacturing, especially for an old building with its own idiosyncrasies.
   Lime mortars were used on the masonry throughout the restoration work and it has all been cleaned using the low-impact JOS® and DOFF® systems – although to a “conservation level” to leave the patina of age on the structure.
   In addition to the restoration of the hotel and train shed, the upgrade of the station to international status required that the platforms be lengthened to accommodate the Eurostar trains, requiring a flat glass-canopy extension. Beneath the platforms and the old hotel, a vast area originally built as a beer cellar has been converted into up-market shops, restaurants and bars, together with passport control, customs and baggage-handling areas.
   McCarthy’s enduring memory of the project is of its scale.
    “The physical scale of it; the time scale; the level or repair; the people involved … it was a huge project,” he says. “Also the team we put together was top class with real quality tradesmen and committed management staff. The work had to be up to scratch, and it had to be right first time because you couldn’t afford for it to be wrong. It’s been incredible.”
   The result is a newly tooled station where sleek, modern trains emerge from the solid foundations of Industrial England. And people will visit simply to look, just as the Victorians did 140 years ago when St. Pancras first opened.
   Claire Santry is a freelance writer covering the stone trade in the United Kingdom.

Client: St. Pancras International (Network Rail), London
Stone Contractor: Stonewest Ltd., Croydon, England