Full steam ahead at St Pancras

The extraordinary confection of the Midland Grand Hotel, opened in 1873, is the result. Scott’s romantic, steep-roofed, turreted and gabled design, with a clock tower to rival Big Ben and a masterly sweep of a broad, curving approach ramp, was naturally the most expensive on offer. The railway directors spent the next few years trying to rein him in, with little success. He had already been thwarted in his ambition to build his Foreign Office on Whitehall as a gothic fantasy: the prime minister, Palmerston, had insisted he produce an Italianate style instead. At St Pancras, he had a free hand. It is vampire-movie fodder, the peak of continental-influenced gothic excess, the endgame of this kind of gung-ho high-Victorian commercial architecture. Even when newly built, its rich and colourful decoration, inside and out, was starting to seem old-fashioned.

While Scott was good at modern medievalism and at resolving the awkward fact that the railway tracks arrived high above the street level outside, he was less good at ­modern comforts. He provided only two bathrooms per gaslit floor. Everyone else was expected to call for hip baths and hot water and chamber pots to be brought to them. And, although the rooms had wonderfully high ceilings, they weren’t so broad as to allow bathrooms to be easily added. Some upgrading took place in the early 20th century, but the hotel closed in 1935, becoming railway offices. Even that use had stopped by the 1980s, since when it has served intermittently as a film set: Harry Potter, inevitably.

In the 1960s, British Rail had planned to demolish the hotel, along with the rest of the station — a fate that had notoriously befallen the old Euston. Conservationists and Victoriana enthusiasts, including the poet John Betjeman, rallied round. Although the building was given Grade I-listed status in 1967, it was still in danger for a decade after that. Plan after plan to restore the hotel came and went: they were all uneconomic. Its exterior was restored in the mid-1990s, however, and a start was made on some of the interiors.

Scott’s building was all hard materials, strong colours and a sense of moral purpose This time round, a different commercial formula was applied. A developer of upscale apartments, Harry Handelsman, of Manhattan Loft Corporation, took the place on when few others would have dared. By converting a lot of it for sale and building a new hotel wing at the back, enough rooms could be created to work as a business. This means there are relatively few in the restored original part — just 38 — but the grand public restaurants and smoking rooms and staircases are all there, painstakingly restored. Scott’s fine ticket office, with its ecclesiastical “linenfold” wood panelling, is reborn as a bar, while the glazed covered way of the hansom-cab approach is now the reception.

I have walked round this building many times over the years since it was abandoned. Now it is buzzing with life again, although it’s clear that a modern hotel — even a “five- star-plus” type, as this Renaissance-branded part of the Marriott empire is pitched — is not the easiest fit with Scott’s gothic mindset, in turn derived from the strictures of the earlier gothic evangelist AWN Pugin. The name of the new hotel, St Pancras Renaissance, denies its architecture. Pugin believed the Renaissance, which brought neo­classicism, had been a bad idea, starting architecture on a decadent, pagan downhill slide. Hence the need for a purifying gothic revival. Scott lapped all this up and applied it to as much of his work as his clients would allow. Strange that all this striving for the ultimate Christian architecture should have reached a frenzied climax not in some great cathedral, but in a railway-station hotel.

Modern hotels are squishy, soft places with neutral tones and a casual, sybaritic air. Scott’s building was all hard materials, strong colours and a sense of moral purpose. The collision of these two worlds — good God! The pale carpets, with their giant swirly patterns! — is therefore sometimes uneasy. Scott often left his rough iron girders exposed, even as he ladled on the ornament elsewhere. The main dining room (to be run by the chef Marcus Wareing) is a 100ft-long curve. The vaulted ceiling to the incredible main double staircase is painted with stars. The corridors are broad and tall. The colours are rich. The whole building, like the whole station, is an embodiment of the Victorian way of simultaneously embracing and subverting the technology of the time. As in a church, its visual lavishness was leavened with austerity. It took the management until 1898 to concede that women should be allowed a place to smoke.

The historic-buildings specialist Richard Griffiths, in conjunction with RHWL architects, has done well to make it work overall. Griffiths has even come up with his own version of Puginian gothic to clad the new rear extension, going back to the sources Scott used. It’s refreshing, for once, not to have yet another example of the glass-box-contrast approach. Inside, though, this new part is just another modern hotel wing. Compare that to the best room in the old part, which is decorated almost entirely as it would have been in Scott’s day, thanks to a patch of original wallpaper found behind a mirror.

Back in 1952, the great, puritanical architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner tried to salvage the then rock-bottom reputation of Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel by arguing that it was arranged in a modern, informal manner. No need to justify it in those terms today. We can glory in its titanic eccentricity, its Victorian bombast, for its own sake. Does it finally work properly as a hotel? I hope so, but that’s not my interest. For me, the hotel and the apartments are just dandy, and deserve to succeed purely as a means to an end. The end being to safeguard permanently one of the best buildings in Britain.