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Title: St Pancras Station by Jack Simmons, Robert Thorne ISBN: 0-948667-68-0 Publisher: Phillimore Co Ltd Pub. Date: February, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: The Story of a Masterpiece of Architecture and Engineering
Comment: If "architecture is frozen music" [Goethe] then the magnificent St Pancras buildings must constitute one of J.S.Bach's major concertos.

This is a book for anyone with an interest in world-class architecture, or history, or great engineering. It's probably quite interesting to railway enthusiasts too!

St. Pancras station and its Midland Grand Hotel manage to combine high art and design with a masterpiece of engineering in an incredible, exuberant, completely 'over-the-top' statement of Victorian company confidence. The book explains in an intelligent and entertaining way, why and how it was achieved by the brilliantly innovative engineer William Henry Barlow, and the eminent and sometimes insensitive architect Sir George Gilbert Scott.

"If the Directors and officers of the Midland company had pooled their collective experience with a view to securing a site for their London station that would combine the greatest possible number of difficulties, they could hardly have fixed on anything better than the one they chose at St. Pancras. It was occupied by a canal, a gas-works, an ancient church with a large and crowded graveyard, and some of the most atrocious slums in London; and through it all ran the Fleet River."

Sir John Betjeman reviewed the original, 1968, edition of this book as "readable, learned, and inspiring". More recently, the author and presenter Dan Cruickshank referred to it in his "Story of Britain's Best Buildings" (BBC Books) as "perceptive".

This new edition is revised and enhanced with interesting new photographs and plans, and an additional chapter by architectural historian Robert Thorne about the revival of St. Pancras. The changes somehow manage to make the book better-balanced than the original.

A classic book about a classic building.