Later I am going to make you interested, for the first time in your life, in grout. This is special grout. It's called Densit Ducorit D4 and it bears the same relation to the stuff round your bathroom tiles as does the Great Pyramid to that tent you never use. When I first saw this grout, I was awestruck, I had to reach out and touch it, and so did Ailie Macadam, a contract manager. "It's liquid metal, really," she says as, together, we stroke the hardened block.
Both this grout and what it does are almost unbearably exciting. But you've got to work up to it, so first you must know about the uncle who, unwisely, brought his orphan nephew Pancratius to Rome, where, at the age of 14, he was beheaded, possibly in AD304. He had died for his Christian faith and was later canonised. In the 7th century, Saint Pancratius's sacred remains were sent to England by Pope Vitalian and, at Canterbury, he gave his name to a church.
Scroll forward about 1,200 years to 1852 and imagine you are the boss of the Midland Railway company, contemplating the edifice of the just-completed King's Cross Station in London. Lewis Cubitt, the architect, has given it a glorious facade of yellow brick consisting of two arches divided by an Italianate clock tower. You are burning with resentment because this station is the property of the Great Northern Railway and you have been reduced to paying a rent to your rival for the privilege of using his new station.
You decide to build something bigger, better and, fatefully, higher. The lines going into King's Cross plunge under Regent's Canal. Yours, however, will soar over the waterway and terminate some 20ft above those of the Great Northern. It is this decision that will lead to Ailie and me stroking that grout. Your station will not sit on the street, it will stand above it. Over your platforms will curve the greatest arch ever constructed, and towering over Euston Road will be the most deliriously gothic hotel ever built. You will christen it St Pancras, the anglicised version of Pancratius, after the boy martyr.
Three men are involved in this project. With the aid of 6,000 men and 1,000 horses, the first, William Henry Barlow, an engineer, completes the arch of the train shed in 1865. The new tracks cut through the yard of St Pancras Church, unearthing countless bodies. The second, the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, is working on the job; as a young man he was an assistant architect. He writes a poem — The Levelled Churchyard — about the macabre work from the point of view of the corpses: "O passenger, pray list and catch/ Our sighs and piteous groans..."
And in 1874, the third, the architect George Gilbert Scott, completes the hotel. The two violently clashing but somehow harmonious structures form one of the greatest wonders of the industrial age. If St Paul's signified the triumph of the English church, St Pancras signifies the global ascendancy of British muck and brass at the climax of the industrial revolution.
Scroll forward another 100 years. The hotel lies empty and rotting and Barlow's shed is dark and almost unrecognisable. With no money to spend, British Rail engineers are resorting to desperate measures. Some of Barlow's "boots" — the wrought-iron containers from which spring his arches — are rusting. They pour concrete around them or pots of paint inside them to prevent further, possibly catastrophic, decay. It is the 1960s and nobody seems to care. Down the road, the Euston Arch — another magnificent monument of the railway age — is demolished in 1962. St Pancras is next.
The vandalism at Euston, however, inspires a change of heart. St Pancras is saved by Sir John Betjeman and a ragged army of agitated Victorian railway geeks. But saved for what? We may suddenly value our industrial past but we are smaller people than Barlow, Scott and Hardy, and can't imagine a use or a meaning for its glories.
The hotel remains empty; the station continues to rot. King's Cross, meanwhile, has also been saved but humiliated by a vile, supposedly temporary, 1960s tat structure between Cubitt's facade and Euston Road. The whole area decays. To the south, cheap hotels provide rooms for the even cheaper whores who cruise Argyle Square. Meanwhile, the industrial hinterland to the north, with its gasometers, its granary, its milk docks and coal drops, sinks into oblivion. The two stations struggle on, as does the London Underground complex beneath. Something like 50m people a year pass through this tatty transport nexus, but few stay in or even notice the blighted zone known as King's Cross.
Then, in 1987, the dismal spectacle condenses into a shabby image of national disgrace. Thirty-one people die in a fire in the Tube station, probably caused by a match discarded on an escalator. The greasy rubbish beneath had ignited and set fire to the wooden treads. This great transport interchange, the pride of Victorian Britain, has become a lethal dump.
But unlikely hope is at hand. In that same year, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterand sign a treaty that will lead us out of that mire. The Fixed Link Treaty is an agreement to build a tunnel joining England and France. This will be a rail tunnel and, after many stops and starts, it is decided the 300-kilometre-per-hour trains from Paris and Brussels will pass over Hardy's corpses to stop in Barlow's shed, behind Scott's hotel. The station of the boy martyr was to be reborn. Bear with me — we're nearly back to the grout.
The Channel tunnel opened in 1994. The trains flew through the French countryside, then dawdled embarrassingly through Kent and southeast London to . . . well, to be honest, Waterloo. The problem was, we hadn't yet managed to build our own high-speed link to the tunnel. The journey time from Waterloo to Paris was 3 hours, 15 minutes; with the link it could be cut to 2 hours, 15 minutes, making the train rather than the plane the obvious choice. But the Eurostars had to wait. Since 1991, there had been arguments about the route and no obvious way to raise the private funding required. Still, there were men like Ted Allett of Union Railways, the company now building the link, who were doggedly pursuing a solution. "I've been 14 years on this project." he says. "In fact, it's been a whirlwind project; it's difficult to see how it could have been done any faster."
The original plan was to sweep up through Kent and southeast London, crossing the Thames at the last minute and arriving in a station "box" under King's Cross. The later, better plan was to follow the motorway and rail lines through Kent, cross the Medway and the Thames, then enter London from due east via Stratford.
