The new Kings Cross railway station

Let there be light! Let your eye fly upwards and zoom along the white ribs of the new 150-metre-wide canopy – the largest single-span structure in Europe – that soars 20m over the western facade of London’s Kings Cross railway station. Sleek, spare, and modern though it is, I immediately think of the exquisite fan vaulting gracing Gothic cathedrals such as Bath.

Kings Cross is a confluence of overground, underground and rail links. Roughly 90 million people use the station station in the course of a year. Many are Scots: the station is London’s gateway to the north, the southern terminus of the East Coast line. On top of that already heavy burden came the news that London would host the 2012 Olympics, and the decision to create a high speed rail link – the Javelin – between St Pancras and the Olympic village, about six miles to the east. It meant Kings Cross would take on even more traffic as passengers made connections to and from its next-door neighbour.

Finally, as every child knows, this is also the station where Harry Potter and his fellow wizards embark, from Platform 9, for Hogwarts. The enormous popularity of those books and films have turned the station a must-see tourist stop, as well.

Originally built in 1852 by engineer/architect Lewis Cubitt, the original train shed had two platforms – arrivals and departures. Over the years Kings Cross expanded, and saw endless changes, including the arrival of the original Flying Scotsman, the first train to reach a speed of 100 miles per hour. Kings Cross became one of the busiest transport hubs in Europe, but at the same time, the neighbourhood around this Grade I listed station went into decline. Hiro Aso, director of urban infrastructure for the architectural firm John McAslan + Partners (JMP), told one newspaper that an early visit to the site was cut short when two prostitutes wielding baseball bats chased him down the street.

A chunk of the station was destroyed by German bombs during the Second World War, and matters weren’t helped by the construction of unsightly retail space tacked onto its southern facade in the 1970s. Indoors, the concourse was far too small to accommodate hordes of passengers arriving and departing around the clock, the vast majority of whom get there via the Underground.

The regeneration of Kings Cross has been bubbling away since 1997, when JMP won the commission to tackle what’s being called the largest urban regeneration project in Europe. It combines reuse, restoration, and new-build, at a budget of 547 million.

From 1997 until 2005, when plans were finalised and construction could begin in earnest, the firm was busy liaising with its client, Network Rail, and the main stakeholders, including Camden borough, English Heritage, and what was then called Railtrack. Simon Goode, associate director at JMP, explains that there were frequent meetings to determine what was wanted, what was needed, and what was possible. These years were also devoted to making planning applications and identifying engineering challenges and solutions.

One of the biggest questions was where to locate the main entrance concourse. Every possibility was explored. John McAslan, the chairman of JMP, says: “We knew that in order for Kings Cross to increase over next 25 years and beyond, the new concourse needed to be at least three times the size of the current one, to handle the amount of passenger traffic. When we began, Network Rail only had ownership to the perimeter of the station itself. The land where we went on to build the new concourse belonged to someone else and that was a problem, because it was an obvious choice for expanding the station.

“Other options included looking at a way that the tracks could be pushed northwards, to make the south concourse deeper. Another was to create a mezzanine within the train shed, or to build a concourse beneath the platforms themselves. So we had a whole bunch of options, all of which were eliminated for various reasons. For example, pushing the platforms out would have cost 600m or 700m, at least, and created problems upstream along the Regent Canal.”