Lost in King's Cross

I had occasion to go to that there London recently, for the best part of a working week. Not for a holiday, nor for a jolly, but for a fairly intensive training course for the day-job. It's nice to have an employer who's happy to invest me again, after a good while without.

Now the training company are a bit of a beast in their field; they've been around a good while too, have a good reputation and are a global training brand. So much so that I used to be a customer of theirs way back in the past, when I worked for a corporate multi-national behemoth and had a personal training budget. Back in those days, I would think nothing of taking three or four courses, four or five days each, per year. How times change, eh?

I'll tell you what else has changed - the nature of training itself. This training company, fifteen or more years ago, used to occupy all five floors of a brick and glass cube near Euston Station, and would play host to so many trainees, every day of every week, that they had their own canteen on the fifth floor to keep their students fed and watered. But time moves on. Technology, more than anything, moves on. These days, most of the company's students take their courses remotely, with a virtual desktop and a webcam - why travel to London and spend the week in a generic hotel when you can take the course from the comfort of your office desk and go home afterwards, right? Except where's the interaction with your classmates and, more importantly, trainer? Where's the space to reflect on the day's learning, as you eat dinner at your table-for-one in the hotel restaurant? And most of all, where's the time and space away from everyday work, to just concentrate on learning. I'm no Luddite, and I completely understand the financial pressures at play here, for both the training company and the trainee, but it does feel to me that something has been lost, and going on a course is not what it was. The training company now occupies only two floors of the same building, and has no canteen any more. For lunch, trainees have to make their own way to the M&S across the road for a sandwich. I wonder what, if anything, will be left in another fifteen years? Why go on a course anyway, when you can just Google the hell out of everything instead, right?

The biggest change of all though is that whole area, from King's Cross and St Pancras up to Euston. Back in my younger days as a trainee, it was - well, there's no other word for it really - a bit of a hole. Seedy, run-down, decrepit. Dirty, in every sense. Back then, my employer used to book me into a nice hotel, quite upmarket. And in that hotel, posh at it was, there would always be a concierge in the bar in the evening, part of whose job it was to identify and remove call girls who would linger there in the hope of picking up well-heeled customers. Whilst at the other end of the scale, venture out of the hotel in the evening to find a bite to eat and you often couldn't walk thirty yards without being propositioned: "You want business?" And every phone box (of which there were still many, back then) was plastered with business cards for all manner of escorts, eager to part the transient population of the area from their money. I remember seeing someone cleaning the phone boxes one morning as I walked to that day's training, assiduously removing every card. By the time I'd finished for the day, eight hours later, they had all been freshly plastered. And looming over everything, at once disapproving and complicit, was the gothic and ever-so-slightly faded grandeur of St Pancras station.

The transformation now is marked. Let's stay with St Pancras, shall we? Now the end of the line for Eurostar, it's clear to see the investment that high-speed link has brought. Still gothic but no longer faded, the building looks fantastic, rejuvenated. There are champagne bars in there, for God's sake, and more shops than you can shake a stick at (station or mall, you decide). And then there's the statuary, like the Meeting Place (aka "The Lovers"), a 30ft bronze of a kissing couple that is frankly breathtaking, or the statue of Sir John Betjeman, or (currently) the mechanical clock installed in front of the more traditional Dent Clock (more here on all of this if you're interested). And this rejuvenation carries on into King's Cross, where the ceiling of the western concourse is a dazzling, dizzying piece of architecture (or is it art?) And of course Harry Potter's Plaform 9¾ brings a queue of selfie-taking tourists, all keen to spend oodles in the adjacent shop - wizard, no doubt, though I didn't venture in. Outside the station, Battle Bridge Place is currently home to Identified Flying Object, a 30ft-high birdcage that is lit in neon at night - bizarre but beautiful. Swish bars are everywhere, none finer than the German Gymnasium (which is a very fine building, more than worthy of its fascinating history). Walk from there up past Google's huge new office (another very conspicuous sign, and source, of inward investment), over the Regent's Canal towards St Martin's, and there's plenty more redevelopment on show, none more arresting than the redeveloped old gasholders, two of which now house apartment buildings with their exterior ironwork intact (to dramatic effect). The third gas holder stands empty, but is artfully lit at night, with the foot of the ironwork clad in subtly angled mirrors and steel, encompassing an undulating lawn - the overall effect is quite beautiful.

All of which sounds great, doesn't it? I certainly sound enthused, hopefully. The art and architecture is wonderful, the bars and restaurants infinitely better than their equivalents of yesteryear, and (whilst I was only staying with the hotel chain Lenny Henry now purports to like for cash) I am happy to report that hotel bars no longer seem to need policing. And not that many phone boxes are left, but those that cling on have only a half-hearted smattering of cards posted in. So, the area is much improved all around... but sanitised too much, maybe? It felt a little out of kilter, otherworldly, uncanny - the familiar had become unfamiliar. The changes taper off as you move towards Euston, and there are still a lot of homeless people rough-sleeping in doorways (maybe more so than when New Labour were in their pomp, fifteen years ago). Beneath the steel and glass, and shiny new paint job, London's rusty hindquarters and matted underbelly cling on. That's probably how it should be.

The Pet Shop Boys had a song called King's Cross, and maybe you were expecting that. But since I very nearly became lost, metaphorically if not literally, in King's Cross, there can only be one song to end this with. I know, any excuse for a bit of Gene...