The original St Pancras was a martyr aged 14 who was beheaded under the persecution of Diocletian. In dire straits, he is the saint to invoke against the headache. The restored St Pancras, opened by the Queen last night, is a monument to British engineering.

It would have been blasphemy to have renamed the station London Gateway, or some other such label devised by marketing philistines; just as it would have been iconoclastic to pull it down — a fate from which it was saved by the late Sir John Betjeman's campaign in the Sixties.

There is an old buffers' tale that the plans were exchanged by accident. The Gothic folly of Gilbert Scott's hotel was really his plan for the viceroy's palace in Delhi. His real station ended up as a military prison.

A statue of Betjeman stands in St Pancras Revived, gazing up at the stately pleasure dome, and, it may be imagined, exclaiming: “Oh, my golly. Oh, my gosh.”

The genius in the restoration is the new use for the undercroft. This is supported by 800 pillars, and was built as a cellarage to store beer. It is now used for check-in areas, lit from huge holes cut out of the original platform level. The mosaics and sky-blue ceiling have been restored, and will no longer be blackened out by soot.

And, miracle! The restoration was finished within budget and on time. So from next week passengers on Eurostar will be delivered into the capital beside that other icon of modern architecture, the British Library. And so we have the perfect confluence of contemporary functionality and historical monument. St Pancras, if reunited with his head, surely looks down with a smile.