LUCINDA LAMBTON: Midland Grand Hotel; St Pancras Station.

In the late 60s the gothic pile of the Midland Grand Hotel was nearly demolished and only a last ditch campaign by conservationists ensured its survival as a grade one listed building. Since then it suffered from two decades of neglect and decay. Now at long last British Rail have embarked on the restoration of the building's famous exterior. But as Lucinda Lampton discovered there are even greater splendors inside. St George for England and St Pancras for Scotland was the great cry that rang out in 1873 when the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras soared up into the sky. It was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the gothic revivalist architect of the Albert Memorial in the Foreign Office as a gargantuan gothic gateway to the Midlands and Highlands and as a hotel giving luxury and ease to travellers. Ever since it opened its doors controversy has raged around this great building with critics loathing its gothic pretensions. A maniac cathedral, this monument of confectionery with elaboration that might be suitable for a chapter house or a cathedral used as an advertising medium for bagman's bedrooms. Scott was adamant that his gothicry conformed loyally and willingly to the habits and requirements of the age. He modestly described it as too good a building. British Rail has now come to the aid of our heroic old friend and St Pancras is to be saved. The exterior is being saved here and now with its famed skyline being restored to its former and fantastic glory with every brick and stone being preserved for a happy posterity. But the fate of the interior is far from certain which is a worrying prospect because if anything Scott's designs inside are even more flamboyant than they are outside. If you arrived by carriage or car you enter the Midland Grand Hotel beneath the Port Clocher. You are swept in around one of the first revolving doors in the country to be straightway embraced by the lofty aspirations of the railway age in a great building that quite trumpets out the triumph of the train with stone, polished limestone, pink from Devonshire and green from Connemara, paintwork and gilding galore as well as mint and tiles beneath your feet. This is a sanctuary of the steam age. The strangest mix of gothicry and the modern arts and crafts movement dawning at this time displaying peacocks tails and urns, swooping capitals and sunflowers all blazing out from pure gothic forms. It has all lain sleeping beneath paint for 58 long years but now if all goes well it could inch by inch colourfully creep back into the world. The Midland Railway prided themselves on the excellence of their hotels and the service that they provided. The kitchens were deep down in the basement. This is almost the strangest of all the discoveries that are to be made in the hotel. A survival of rooms that would be extraordinary enough to come upon in some remote spot in the British Isles but certainly not here in the very heart of London beneath the Euston Road. Great tile hung corridors weave past pantries and sculleries, wine cellars and meat hanging rooms to the vast kitchen. After the hotel closed it was used as a linen store by the Midland Railway hence these tiers of wooden shelves to the ceiling. This enormous room was once hung with decorative tiles which can and I hope will be revealed once again for elicitous ease. For their time the amenities were modern and up to the minute. The hotel was one of the first in the country to have lifts that were named by an enchanting series of names, rising rooms, ascending chambers and vertical railways. They are still here permanently trapped on their upward journey. One terrible night here in 1883 a Mr. Smith opened a door upstairs and not being familiar with the novel arrangement of a gaping hole behind it he plunged to his death. I'm afraid not far from here. The ladies smoking room on the first floor was the first in the world where ladies were allowed to sit and publicly puff away at their charrutes. Sleekly sumptuous with its polished granite and its carved stonework it was filled to bursting points with velvet sofas draped with crocheted antimacathel. The ladies enjoyed an exciting device in this room called the electrophone that was invented by Thaddeus Cattle and like a telephone it was connected to churches and theatres and concert halls throughout the country and you had to listen to it straining for its tinny tones. Outside on the balcony once brilliantly shining with bronze and brass gold leaf and paint the ladies would sit smoking away beneath an awning. Rooting about in the cellars rummaging through St Pancras's past I think that I may well have come upon the very awning. When the lines were laid into London the graveyard of old St Pancras church had to be cleared and it was the poet Thomas Hardy who was then an architect's assistant who was put in charge of all the reburials. He wrote the grimmest lines on the confusion of all the coffins together. Oh passenger pray listen catch our thighs and piteous groans half stifled in this jumble patch of wrenched memorial stones we late lamented resting here are mixed a human jam and each to each exclaim in fear I know not which I am. From this window you look down on the sensational train shed with its 240 foot roof span that was the largest in the world when it was built in 1868. It was designed by the engineer Barlow vast and gaping to devour incoming engines wrote John Betjeman. He relished St Pancras. I can remember these gothic arches echoing when this place was an hotel to the tones of a three-piece string band situated in a Turkish tent at the well of the main staircase. A rendement of this exotica survives the mashabia or veil behind which coffee was sipped and this is the grand staircase of the Midland Grand weaving and whirling up the full height of the building. Those ornamental trusses up there are made of cast iron which has then been covered in plaster and painted to look like wood. The crimson of the walls has always seemed luscious enough but look what has been discovered of the intricate dedo design. Railway termini and hotels are to the 19th century what monasteries and cathedrals were to the 13th century wrote a learned journal in 1875. They are truly the only real representative buildings we possess. You can just see the brilliant blue glimmering with gold stars once shone down from the vaulting. The eight virtues here's industry with her spinning wheel still proudly flank the arms of the Midland railway. While the exterior of this magnificent building is safe indeed it is being made sounder by the minute the fate of the interior is still in doubt. If as is mooted St Pancras becomes the railway terminus for the channel tunnel then it will be full steam ahead for the restoration of all these hidden gems. In 1859 Sir George Gilbert Scott had his gothic schemes for the foreign office turned down by Lord Palmerston and after two years of desperate lamentations and annoyance he was forced in his own words to eat his leek and build a foreign office in the classical style. What sweet sweet irony it would be if Scott's great gothic masterpiece was able now to do as much for Britain standing abroad as does the classical power that he was coerced into building all those years ago and how proud we would all be of this glorious gothic gateway to Europe. Lucinda Lampton and the restorers are keen to find out.