Hopes are rising that the Euston Arch, the first great monument of the railway age, can be rebuilt when Euston Station is redeveloped from 2009 onwards.

The arch was demolished amid bitter controversy in 1962 on the personal authority of the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. But the ferocity of the public outcry, ranging from Sir John Betjeman and the Victorian Society to modernists such as Alison and Peter Smithson, helped to ensure that King’s Cross, Liverpool Street and, most recently, St Pancras have all been restored to splendour after extensive modernisation.

More recently, Sir Terry Farrell, one of Britain’s leading master planners, has damned Euston Road as London’s most dreadful highway, calling for its transformation into a leafy boulevard like the Paseo del Prado in Madrid where monumental buildings great and small take pride of place.

Ironically, the Euston Arch was not an arch at all but a Greek propylaeum modelled on the entrance to the Acropolis. Appropriately, on Euston Road are three of London’s most prominent classical churches: Sir John Soane’s Holy Trinity, Marylebone; the grand Corinthian portico of St Mary’s Marylebone; and the exquisite Greek Revival St Pancras Church, complete with caryatid porch.

Dan Cruickshank, the founder of the Euston Arch Trust, proposes that the arch be rebuilt between the two pretty Italianate lodges which today are the sole indication to the passer-by that one of London’s great railway terminuses lies behind. Rebuilt here, the arch would give the station a presence akin to the grand frontages of St Pancras and King’s Cross and the Great Central Hotel (now Landmark Hotel) in front of Marylebone Station.

For Cruickshank this has been a Holy Grail quest. He said: “Frank Valori, the man employed by British Rail to demolish the Euston Arch, implied that, on his own initiative, he numbered the stones, dismantled them carefully and stored them. Sadly this is not true.”

Cruickshank’s researches show that the arch was speedily demolished and that most of the stones were given to the British Waterways Board to help fill a hole that had been scoured in the bed of the Prescott Channel of the River Lea, close to the 2012 Olympic site.

Cruickshank triumphantly raised a section of one of the columns in front of cameras ten years ago. This showed that the columns were not built of solid drums of stone in the Ancient Greek manner but of four segments around a hollow core held together by wrought-iron bracing.

The arch was built in 1837, and, in keeping with the new railway age, made use of new technology to reduce the amount of stone needed. The architect, Philip Hardwick, was a pioneer of unadorned industrial architecture and a designer of the great warehouses in the London docks.

Cruickshank takes new heart from the enormous interest generated by the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, where a remarkable amount of still blackened stone salvaged from the inferno of the 1945 bombing raid has been incorporated in a faithful reconstruction of great beauty. Cruickshank estimates that as much as 60 per cent of the facing stone of the arch may lie in the riverbed, and for the rest the original Yorkshire gritstone quarry at Bramley is still in operation.

“We urgently need more diving. If the stone is there we could build a coffer dam and crane it out,” he said.

The cost will clearly have risen since the initial £6 million estimate in 1996 but, say, £10 million, within a £300 million station and office development by British Land and Network Rail is far from out of the question.

The arch could be put to enterprising use by creating lettable space at the top. Arthur Somerset of Mask, the leading events organiser in London, is looking for architectural landmarks to hold events.

He said: “When I give an introductory talk to Americans I blow them away saying we can offer 1,000 venues ranging from the 13th century onwards and not one is a hotel or restaurant.”

English Heritage lets the Wellington Arch for parties and receptions. The Euston Arch rising to 70ft will be larger still with headroom at the top rising to 28ft.

With ingenious engineering there can be lifts and stairs at the four corners. An intriguing idea is the creation of a straight stone staircase in the thickness of the walls. Think of the Temple of Karnak at Luxor and imagine Pompeian red walls and bronze torchères.

Lord Rogers of Riverside dramatically included a giant 1920s classical arch when he rebuilt Lloyd’s of London in the early 1980s.

Transport engineer Alan Baxter said: “One of the keys to the new station will be improvements to the Underground station beneath and beside Euston Road. But nothing done there need preclude rebuilding the arch above.”

Sir Terry Farrell added: “As it stands, Euston Station is a textbook example of how not to plan a station. The arch should come back as one of the great set pieces along Euston Road.”

Network Rail said it would announce its choice of architect for the new Euston Station in a month’s time.

— Marcus Binney is president of SAVE Britain’s Heritage