An Architecture of Death

The architectural development of Euston has been a triumph of means over ends. Euston is an environment created on the logic that quality of life depends not on how aesthetically pleasing we can make the public spaces through which we encounter each other, but on how effective and profitable we can make those spaces. The architecture on show is Euston is a triumph of the private gain of the few over the celebration of the life and spirit of the masses. The story of much of Euston over the last fifty years has been one of destroying the beauty of the area to make it more traversable; to turn it into a factory for conveying humans. In the 1960s British Rail proposed to demolish the classical Greek inspired Euston train station, as well as the neo-gothic St Pancras train station. A combination of Whitehall officials, MPs and poet laureate John Betjeman managed to save St Pancras, but no-one was able to save Euston station or its arch – which was demolished in the 1960s.

More recent erections to the east of Euston Road, an area which developers British Land are trying to gentrify by naming Regent’s Place, have only served up a glassier version of what has gone before. The bunch of high rise tower blocks reflect off each other, distorting each others’ images, as if they were a gaggle of ugly sisters all trying to do the other one down. Regent’s Place is an area of land which recently formed part of the Crown Estate, but now under the ownership of British Land, a massive property development and investment company. Anne Ashworth comments: “British Land is engaged in a £1 billion revamp of Euston, aiming to re-establish the station as a place where passengers are delighted, rather than dispirited, to arrive or embark”. The developments were narrowly accepted by local Camden Council 6-5. What has already been built at Regents Place is dull and uninspiring. It involves numerous indistinct glass and concrete buildings – what looks like a poor imitation of the City of London.

Already developed, Triton Square is a chance for the soft skinned fleshy business animals to relieve themselves of their glass and concrete shells for a half hour or so – and bathe in the grey skies of London and pollution of Euston Road. The animals sit on the bum high walls, engage in an uneasy rest and drift into a meditative focus on the taste of their sandwich, as meaning and their perceptions drift into a blur. Refuelling to get back into the machine, to do battle once again – busy making money for people. Triton Square has been called a ‘popular 24-hour attraction and destination’. You’re having a laugh. According to Spencer Darg Triton Square is visually dramatic – that is bullshit – Triton Square is visually anodyne. Tiananmen Square is visually dramatic – all the more so when hundreds of protestors are being shot to death by the Chinese mafia – but Triton Square is nothing like that. Triton Square is so lacking in drama – that some people barely find the motivation to direct their lunch time sandwiches to their mouths. Darg says Triton Square “opens to the sun and the south but it is engulfed by noise from the Euston Road and battered by gusting winds generated by the high buildings”. Hmmm, fair enough, I wouldn’t know otherwise. The atmosphere around Triton Square during the day is post-holocaust.

Spores Sent from the Midlands

The conception of Euston began with the construction of the New Road, an eighteenth century bypass built for a burgeoning London. The road is today known as Euston Road and having been enveloped by the ceaseless growth of London, is no longer a bypass but a busy thoroughfare channelling traffic from Paddington to the City of London and vice versa.

Nevertheless, the advent of the New Road prompted the landed gentry to rent their land out to developers who started to build new suburbs which had been made accessible to the masses.

One such development, in 1834, included the creation of the world’s first capital railway terminal, what was originally known as Euston Square train station. Capitalists took swabs from the mouth of Birmingham and wiped the collated spores in a concentrated patch in north London. The spores began to grow a long spindly arm which traced its way back home – forming what became known as the Birmingham London Railway Line. Euston train station opened in 1837, modelled on classical Greek architecture. To mark opening of the world’s first capital railway terminal a seventy foot high arch was constructed, built from Portland stone, which was intended to be ‘the modern equivalent to the gates of ancient cities’. The Euston Arch, as it became known, was a scaled up replica of ‘a Doric portico…the kind that might have been seen in a classical Greek town, but on a colossal scale.’ (Gayford, 2008). For this reason the arch was also called the ‘Doric Arch’. Cain has given a different more cynical but perhaps more realistic interpretation for the reasoning behind the building of the Euston Arch. Cain said the arch, “was a weapon in the period's culture wars - a not-so-subtle effort to connect the mechanical, industrial, dirty new steam technologies to classical notions of grandeur and accomplishment. It added elegance and style to an awkward, inelegant profit-making business.”

In 1849 a Great Hall was added and a Ticket Office was built in 1916. Both buildings, carrying on in the classical Greek model, were incredible pieces of architectural achievement – in stark contrast to the dull and unimaginative erections that dominate the Euston landscape today. The Great Hall was described by dmj1962 as “in the Ionic style, it had a dramatic coffered ceiling and a grand, curving double staircase. It also contained the Shareholders’ Meeting Room, decorated in a sumptuous Baroque.”

In the 1870s, four small lodges, built out of Portland stone, were constructed outside the station in Euston Grove. The lodges were used as parcel collecting points and had, inscribed into their walls, the names of the towns which the Euston railway line served. Two lodges still stand today although in an urban landscape unrecognisable from the one they were originally built in. In 1995 one of the lodges was turned into a private club for women. Today the lodges look confused and dazed, like dogs who have lost their owners, in an environment for which they were not originally intended.

Joseph Cain comments on the initial engineering problems that the Euston train station posed to engineers: “Interestingly, Euston Grove was a poor engineering choice. Steam locomotives of the 1830s lacked sufficient horsepower to move carriages laden with passengers and freight up the incline to Chalk Farm. And the space in Euston was too cramped for manoeuvring engines to turn them around. As a result, outbound trains from Euston Grove were powered by rope pulled from stationary steam engines located at Chalk Farm. On arrival at Chalk Farm, trains had their locomotive attached, and passengers continued on their way. Inbound trains were detached at Chalk Farm, then coasted into Euston Grove with the skill of brakemen. This arrangement lasted until July 1844, when more powerful locomotives were available.”

Rats in Euston Train Station

. In 2008 Euston train station, once an inspiration for the world, is now a squalid looking square of bleakness, situated in a suburb on its deathbed, framed by three deathly thoroughfares. True it is well used, 27 million passengers a year and its open 24 hours a day. However the original Euston train station, with its classical Greek accoutrements, was demolished in the 1960s, after bits were damaged during the war, and the station’s small size struggled to cope with growing numbers of commuters. The new Euston station was expanded southwards eating up the area on which the Euston Arch once stood and huge swathes of Drummond Street which once ran parallel to it. However instead of the new station being classical Greek architecture on an even bigger scale, the architects and urban planners went for a 1960s airport replica. The results were underwhelming and nauseating.

Euston station is like a flattened box – a concrete coated wafer of mundane modernism. Inside its like what you imagine a prison to be, dark, unhappy, uncomfortable and slightly dangerous. There are a plethora of snacks stalls, but they are all so sad looking, the whole place has the atmosphere of a sewer, I feel like humanity has been reduced to rats when I walk around this place. In early 2008 there was a notice about a woman who had been sexually assaulted by a man in the station. The trains sit in what seem like underground bunkers, in virtual darkness. Outside the station is a huge dirty brown brick wall – looking like some kind of Eastern European monolith. The station sits enclosed by a triangle of death, consisting of Euston Road, Hampstead Road and Eversholt Street.

Richard Morrison provided the perfect description of Euston train station stating "Even by the bleak standards of Sixties architecture, Euston is one of the nastiest concrete boxes in London: devoid of any decorative merit; seemingly concocted to induce maximum angst among passengers; and a blight on surrounding streets. The design should never have left the drawing-board — if, indeed, it was ever on a drawing-board. It gives the impression of having been scribbled on the back of a soiled paper bag by a thuggish android with a grudge against humanity and a vampiric loathing of sunlight."

Plans are now afoot for developing Euston station once again.

In 1966 as well as England winning their only World Cup, British Rail employed West Indian Asquith Xavier, bringing an end to a racist colour bar on black workers at Euston Station.

Revival of the Euston Arch

The destruction of the Euston Arch caused some controversy. At first the proposal was made to keep the arch but re-erect it on a different site; apparently the demolition contractor agreed to pay for the relocation (see dmj1962). However according to Gayford (2008) the state run British Rail concluded that re-erection would be too expensive. Interestingly, the remains of Euston Arch were found in the 1990s: ‘a large proportion of the remains of the arch were located in East London where they sit at the bottom of the Prescott Channel off the River Lea’. This discovery led to a campaign to rebuild the arch ‘either with stones recovered from beneath the water and elsewhere or with new stone from the quarry from which the original stone was first cut.’

With plans for Network Rail and private developers British Land to rebuild Euston train station, ‘the Trust was re-launched to ensure that the new station included a rebuilt Euston Arch.’ (See www.eustonarch.org). It has been pointed out that restoring Euston Arch would enhance the sense of tradition and fine British architecture that the restoration of Saint Pancras International has done so much for. Certainly it is clear to see that the restoration of the Euston Arch in place of the abomination that currently stands at Euston would give the prospect of rejuvenating Euston Road, and provide a marvelous compliment to the neo-gothic façade of St Pancras International.

Euston Road: Orchestrating Britain

Euston is a portal in the transport matrix, a place which sucks you up and propels you onwards and outwards at great speeds. The transport links take you places faster, and bring those places closer to Euston. Being closer to the rest of the country, Euston is a natural sport to place major institutions with massive numbers of users. Euston Road hosts a number of national institutions including the British Library, the Wellcome Museum, three important train stations in Euston, Kings Cross and St Pancras International; as well as the headquarters for Unison, the Quakers and Abbey National. These institutions are like a collective of conductors, tall and erect, oblivious to the polluted sediment being secreted on their overcoats, orchestrating human activity up and down the country.

Knowledge, Science, Euston and Progresss

Who knows, in years to come Euston may become the place to hang out for lovers of science, medicine and knowledge. With the Wellcome Trust museum, the University College Hospital and the British Library it has made a good start.

The Wellcome Building is owned by the Wellcome Trust, an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health. Established in 1936, with an endowment of around £15 billion, the trust is the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research. The endowment was left by pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome, who died in 1936. The Wellcome Trust Building contains a library, which contains a collection of books, manuscripts, archives, films and pictures on the history of medicine from the earliest times to the present day. It was opened by James Watson, one of the co-founders of DNA. The museum is well worth a visit.

Surprisingly, given the pollution, UCH, the University College Hospital is located at the western tip of Euston Road. Housed in a giant green and white glass building, which opened in 2005 the UCH has been called the premier league of hospitals. The building is composed of a sixteen floor tower which gets most of the attention of the city, and a faithful companion in a podium block which houses the operating theatres and outpatients departments (McCabe and Willars, 2007). The architects of this high rise hospital have praised it for having short travelling distances compared with low level sprawling hospitals. Its tall tower allows a lot of light to get in and gives patients and staff alike great views (McCabe and Willars, 2007). All this talk about architecture and design. If you read the comments that members of the public leave about the hospital you’ll find the only thing they care about is how they are treated. People matter, buildings matter but not as much. The UCL Hospital Foundation Trust offer volunteer posts in a range of areas including guiding patients and members of the public around the building; the hospital library, the hospital radio station City Beat and complementary therapies.

Adding to the great stock of knowledge is the British Library. In the great tradition of shit British architecture, for which Euston excels, the outside of the British Library is one of the most expensive 1970s shopping precinct style facades that the British taxpayer has ever had the misfortune of being required to sink its money into. What is all the more amazing is that the principal architect Sir Colin St John Wilson, took a staggering thirty-six years to complete it. During the 1960s when plans were being drawn up for a new British Library, the intention was to site the library across the road from its old site in Bloomsbury. This would have required the demolition of a large swathe of housing. With the residents of Bloomsbury putting up effective resistance to the initiative, a new site was found at St Pancras on land to be vacated by British Rail. St John Wilson built the British Library to last for another two hundred and fifty years. Let’s see if it does!

St Pancras International and Kings Cross

Saint Pancras international opened for business in November 2007. The gleaming glass and steel structure of its train shed, at one point the largest single span structure built, allows the sky light to flood into the station. The redevelopment of Saint Pancras was a real fillip for the British spirit; reminiscent of July 6th 2006, the day Britain was awarded the 2012 Olympics. St Pancras train station was built by the Midland Railway Company in 1868 to increase the reach and ease of access of its trains into central London. Midland Railway wanted to make their station the proudest and most dominant landmark in its locality. That might not seem to have been too much of a feat given the state of Euston Road these days, but with Euston train station being a shining example of classical Greek architecture in the nineteenth century in actual fact it wasn’t going to be easy. To this end the engineer William Henry Barlow decided to build the whole station on 1000 18 foot cast iron pillars. Further more he identified that the resulting undercroft could be used for and should be designed for storing barrels of beer. (McKie, 2007).

Many people get confused not sure if St Pancras and Kings Cross are the same train station. They are completely different train stations with different histories and purposes. They are however linked via a set of underground passageways – and are served by the same set of underground tubes, i.e. if one train stops at St Pancras it doesn’t then stop at Kings Cross and vice versa. St Pancras sits to the west of Kings Cross station and is distinct because it sits majestic, reaching for the skies with its elegant red spires. Kings Cross on the other hand is drab and simplistic, humbled in comparison, almost depressed and beaten, like the local prostitutes, who have experienced years of being fucked by drunkard diseased power mad abusive men, and the pimps who control them.

Making Time for God in Euston

The Quakers Religious Society of Friends has its base on Euston Road. The society's headquarters is a rather pleasant oldish looking building lost amongst the towerblocks and hustle and bustle of Euston Road. The headquarters has a bookshop, which has its own mini-cafe, which when I went in on a Monday afternoon, was silent and empty; and a garden. The image below is from a Quaker poster, the dove of peace, in this case seemingly encumbered with a piece of pigeon shit. How often does pigeon shit get in the way of peace? "Urghh, get off, fucking dirty pigeons - here I am flying around trying to secure peace, an ambassador for peace and these dirty fucking pigeons keep shitting in my eye". According to the Quakers website, "Quakers share a way of life rather than a set of beliefs. Quakers seek to experience God directly, within ourselves and in our relationships with others and the world around us… Our focus is on our experience rather than written statements of belief.” Seems a sensible, flexible and accomodating and ultimately non-domineering way of going about religion.

Carrying on with the religion on Euston Road theme, St Pancras Church is a big old church which stands on the south-east corner of Euston Road and Upper Woburn Place. The church was built in the early nineteenth century, in what has been called the ‘Greek Revival’ style, to serve what was in those days the ‘Borough of St Pancras’ which used to stretch from Oxford Street to Highgate. The Borough of St Pancras has since ceased to exist and with an increase in the density of the population in the area, the church now serves a much smaller geographical locality. In its day the church was the most expensive church to be built in London since the building of St Paul’s Cathedral (see wikipedia entry). According to UK Attraction.com the four caryatids, which support the ceiling of the church’s crypt, were based on those of a temple in Athens; following Euston train station in the tradition of mimicking classical Greek architecture. The website claims “The figures were originally made taller in error, and had to have a middle section removed so they could fit under the roof. They guard the entrance to the crypt, which was closed as a burial vault in 1854 and later used as an air-raid shelter in both World Wars.”

Raising the Stakes

On the east side of Euston Road, in the Kings Cross area, there are a number of shops, each one connected with gambling in some way. On the eastern corner you have 'Play To Win' a shady little one armed bandit joint illuminated by neon lights. One shop along you then have Ladbrokes, a more socially acceptable form of gambling one which in 2008 Lee Dixon, Iain Wright, Ally McCoist and Chris Kamara (all famous TV pundit ex-footballers) were using their personnas to help Ladbrokes attract adults (and whether intended or not children) into gambling. And then skip another shop and on the western corner of the block you have a 'bureau de change', an even more socially acceptable form of gambling, and one in which we often have no choice but to engage in. In all three cases the proprietors are making a profit from our desire to have and obtain money - interesting - that is what Euston and Kings Cross have always been about - the naked desire for money and power.

The Only Oasis I know of in Euston

Euston Road is an unforgiving environment – the cars and lorries hustle their way through the city streets – commuters stiffen up, bristle and move forward with determination. Its such a harsh environment – that stumbling across Stern’s World Café can seem like stumbling across an oasis. Stern's World Café is one half of a shop, of which the other half contains an assortment of so-called world music. I don't know about the world music, not being a great fan of it, but I do know that the food they serve is fantastic. I had the most amazing spicy prawn salad - it was fantastic - thoroughly delicious - and I won’t hesitate to go back there and eat again. You can get to the cafe from both Warren Street, and also through the music shop entrance from Euston Road, but blink once and you'd miss it. It really is an oasis of peace and tranquility for anyone looking for salvation from the stresses and strains of the fucked up environment of Euston Road - and functions like a magic doorway into the tranquillity and peace of Warren Street.

Quirky

This is a really interesting shop not least for the variety of chess boards on offer, but also because of the huge oversized set of playing cards that they have - practically A4 size - which you can purchase as a set for thirty quid - they'd make a great birthday present I think.

Euston Square and Euston Grove

Euston Square - and more precisely Euston Grove - is a shadow of its former self. Dominated by a bus station, roundabout and imposing black office blocks the square has lost much of the charm it had when first laid out in the 1810s. Soon after in the 1830s the area became the centre for the new Euston station and development from then onwards owed much to the nature of the station. Expansion in the area in 1870 saw the construction of the two lodges that remain to this day. The lodges were not simply symbolic but also functioned as information and parcel collecting points. A bronze statue of Robert Stephenson (see below) was placed in the central reservation at the Grove's entrance. It was also at this time that the word 'Euston' was carved onto the arch.

Euston Station Collonade

Euston Station Collonade reminds me of the town centre of some very small depressed town in some outpost of the United Kingdom that most people don’t know exists, with high unemployment, and where everyone smokes and eats pie and chips, hits their children round the head and swear at each other, before drowning their sorrows in some gloomy looking boozer that would inspire a Manic Street Preachers number one. It is a place for drop-outs, pigeons, and fifty year olds who wear blazers, stink of cigarettes and sit cross legged staring at paving stones.

Whilst in theory a resting place for everyone who commutes to and from and through Euston train station, the Collonade tends to draw people who look like they might have mental health problems or a history of domestic violence. Shrivelled, dried guys puffing on cigarettes. People wandering around not sure where they’re going. People with problems on their minds, that you get the impression their internal mental worlds are bigger and more chaotic than the actual world which exists outside them.

All around you can see the blacks of the new tower blocks, the greys of the breezeblock structures, and the stained white tiles of a spiral staircase, all constantly bombarded by pigeon shit, and resonating to the wheezing of London’s buses and whirring of the nearby traffic. Meanwhile countless businessmen and women escape from their towers of power, adding to the pollution with their five minute fag break, before the tension on their mental corporate elastic band kicks in and they are taken back into do service to mammon.

On a grey day there is a certain poetic beautify, at least if you isolate it with a photo lense, to the different shades of grey which are made up by the jet black buildings, stained white staircase, breezeblock structures and anxious pigeons. It all seems to make sense, for some bizarre reason. There’s something much more earthy to Euston Collonade, something much more real and gritty, than the sanitised corporate zones down the road. Here there is real life – real pain and hatred and suffering on peoples’ faces. Down the road in Regents Place – where the corporates eat their coffee shop sandwiches – all feeling is submerged into a highly regulated and controlled passive and apparently vacant physiognomy enhanced with moisturisers. The truth can be found in Euston Train Station Collonade but for how much longer I don’t know.

Euston and Sex

Euston train station has quite a seedy feel to it. It is Euston for example which is the home for the ‘tawdry sex den’ which Max Mosley was alleged to have a financial interest in. It is the southern part of Eversholt Street which is most seedy. This dusty and unforgiving street has a dodgy looking bookshop as well as a lap dancing club. To finish it off it also hosts London’s most intriguing shop, Transformations. On its shop wall Transformations has an image of a fairly plain looking blonde haired guy, looking a bit directionless and without much joie de vivre, next to his future destination, a rather vulnerable and yet happy woman with a Coronation Street perm and an over the top cocktail dress waiting to be plucked. Check out the website for more male fantasies, there are some great images of the ‘woman’ who runs Transformations in a four poster bed with a smooth looking black buy wearing a gold chain and a glass of champagne. The before photo showed a balding businessman from the northeast in a grey suit and briefcase – what made me laugh about this most – is how many similarly looking accountants from Newcastle are going through the motions of their nine to five dreaming about four poster beds and being fed olive on sticks by Craig David look-alikes? Sex changes are mental – and so are sex change shops – but if we have to have them no better place than Euston. The owner of Transformations obviously has a sense of humor commenting, ‘Transformations offer transvestites, crossdressers and transgendered a discreet , confidential and truly feminine shopping experience, as well as providing a he to she make over service. I know the supermarkets are trying to take over the world these days but here’s one local Euston shop that wont be fearing a Tescos in the neighbourhood.’

Sex can be found in other more unlikely places. According to the the Londonist The British Library ‘holds the world's foremost collection of tart cards -- those colourful adverts that decorate London's phone boxes.’ The Londonist goes on to explain that Stephen Lowther, who is responsible for maintaining the collection, ‘periodically checks the local phone boxes -- centering on the unholy trinity of King's Cross, Warren Street and Baker Street -- for new varieties of filth…. Over 20 years, the collection has built up to 17 boxes.’

That’s Magic!

The Centre of the Magic Arts is the headquarters of the Magic Circle and has been since 1998. The Centre boasts a library and a museum.

The Magic Circle’s emblem photographed above is the zodiac – but why the zodiac was chosen to represent the Circle remains a mystery.

The Magic Circle is a private club where magicians meet to ‘invent illusions, share secrets and master their magic’. According to the article on the Magic Circle on -Wikipedia acceptance into the Circle requires that the applicant is known to two members of the Circle and is able to perform a trick to the standard expected of the Council of the Magic Circle. The Circle’s motto indocilis privata loqui reflects the requirement placed upon members not to disclose their secrets.

The club was men only until 1991 and has around 1,500 members. In 1972 a 23 year old dancer and magician named Diane Matthews burned her bra in protest at being barred (article written by David Beckley featured in: Dawes and Bailey, 2005).

The Magic Circle mission statement is “To be acknowledged as the premier magical society in the world by magicians and the public alike through the pursuit of the highest standards and the promotion of the art of magic and the appreciation of its heritage.”

Places for Living In Euston

Drummond Street is nothing like Brick Lane, London’s famed Bengali dominated curry house street, where bearded Bengalis mix with London’s bohemians, trendies and artists.

Drummond Street is however Euston’s most happening place in terms of interesting places to eat out and grocery stores. Remember that Euston has been transformed into one of the most monotonous corporate square kilometre of uniformity this side of Slough Retail Park.

Recently, bad rice harvests in India, the trend towards younger Bengalis going into non-restaurant businesses, and recent restrictions on Asian chefs coming to work in Britain have put strains on the curry house businesses in Drummond Street (Foot and Harman, 2008).

Drummond Street has over the last ten years been the scene of various fights and attacks perpetrated by Asian youths. In 2003 two teenagers attacked another two teenagers with baseball bats on the corner of Drummond Street (Walker, 2003)

The road heads eastwards from Regent’s Park towards Euston train station. Before the redevelopment of Euston train station in the 1960s Drummond Street extended further to the west, in to what is now the train station, through what was called the ‘Euston Arch’ and into Doric Way, a small street in Somers Town near to St Pancras International train station. The urban planners decided to demolish Euston Arch and put up the soul destroying ugliness that those who live and work in Euston have to put up with day after day. Euston train station is due to be redeveloped within the next few years. Some have been campaigning for the restoration of the arch. Whatever happens Drummond Street will always be looking a bit castrated and disconsolate.

Tolmers Square is a red brick residential area – unremarkable to say the least. You’d never find them if you didn’t know they were there or were an intrepid explorer – they are buried behind the towering office blocks which dominate Euston near Hampstead Road – it almost feels like you’ve entered a secret society when you enter into Tolmers Square. Tolmers Square is actually very quiet and peaceful – it seems like there are quite a few Asian families there.

Hidden London reveals that Tolmers Square was originally laid out in the 1860s on land belonging to the New River Company and named after a Hertfordshire hamlet near the river’s source. The site goes on to point out that Greeks and Cypriots settled in the square after the second world war, and were in turn followed by Asians.

Disputes over the future of the square, which involved squabbles between land developers and local people and students looking to further the interest of the community, have gone down in ‘urban planning’ legend. According to Hidden London ‘The activists failed to prevent the destruction of much of the original housing, but succeeded in persuading Camden council to compulsorily purchase the site from the property company Stock Conversion. Plans to construct half a million square feet of office space were abandoned and Tolmers Square was rebuilt with council flats and a Young’s pub.’ A book has been written on this subject by Nick Wates.

North Gower street is a going nowhere kind of street, which connects the dusty Hampstead Road to Euston Road and Euston train station. At the Hampstead Road area there is a pedestrianised zone where various drunkards hang out, downing the booze, walking up and down in affected strops, and shouting and laughing at each other.

Parks in Euston

St James Gardens is a small park, nothing special, but a nice peaceful area to hang around at lunchtime if you have the misfortune of working or otherwise being in the Euston area of London. It was a former burial ground, described in 1878 as ' a large, dreary, and ill-kept burial-ground' and some graves still lie there today in the northern most part of the gardens. There is a multi-use games area, which according to the local Council website is marked out for football, basketball and tennis. There are still a number of tombstones in the gardens.

Hotels in Euston

Ibis Hotel Euston couldn't be more perfectly located for anyone wanting to commute from and to Euston Train Station being located opposite the train station just a few steps across the quiet Cardington Street. Great if all you want to do is go to sleep, get up and bugger off, but don't think about stopping here to enjoy the local nightlife. Euston is half seedy as fuck and half soulless modern corporate business park. There are one or two things worth having a look at on Euston Road, including the British Library, the Wellcome Trust Museum and a few odd shops, including a chess shop and a cheap as chips bookshop. According to London Travel Guide 'The hotel is basic in design, with 380 bedrooms, an informal restaurant and bar, and a private underground car park'.

The Thistle Hotel at Euston might be a convenient stop off point for any one disembarking from Euston train station, which is just across the road. Its looks however, leave a lot to be desired, being 1970s style concrete blocks - it looks like an office block or what you might expect a morgue would look like - which is apt given that it backs on to St James Gardens - a dog turd of a park which still has grave stones in from when it used to be a cemetry. Mixed reviews on the internet from OK to crap.The Thistle Hotel is nothing special judging from the outside - it looks like a 1970s functionalist designed meteorite landed in Euston and some entrepreneur decided to carve it out and turn it into a hotel. Its based on Cardington Street, which is a quiet enough street, based inside a public urban matrix of train stations and busy roads. It seems peaceful enough in the day time but I wouldn't really like to try it out at night - I'm sure its OK if you're in a group - but if you're looking to spend as little time as possible on Cardington Street but want a hotel just across the road from Euston you might also want to check out the Ibis Hotel which is literally a stone's throw from one of Euston train station's exit.

Recommended Places to Eat

The African Kitchen usually has a variety of African furniture and other things outside for sale. It is sandwiched into what is an otherwise Asian street, full of curry houses and Asian grocery stores, in the heart of Euston, a dirty and edgy area in north London. User reviews suggest that it is small, cheap and cheerful, and everything is done with a personal touch. Sounds like a place worth checking out if you are in the area.

According the the Londonist ‘The centre holds the world's foremost collection of tart cards -- those colourful adverts that decorate London's phone boxes.’ The Londonist goes on to explain that Stephen Lowther, who is responsible for maintaining the collection, ‘periodically checks the local phone boxes -- centering on the unholy trinity of King's Cross, Warren Street and Baker Street -- for new varieties of filth…. Over 20 years, the collection has built up to 17 boxes.’

Links

• 'Euston Road and Hampstead Road', Old and New London: Volume 5 (1878), pp. 301-309. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45238. Date accessed: 18 August 2008. >
• Picture of Hampstead Road in 1820
• Questions about the Euston Arch Trust
• Practical Information about Euston train station on Network Rail
• Martin Gayford (2008) Time to rebuild the colossus, i.e. Euston Arch, The Daily Telegraph.
• Image of the Great Hall in Euston Station – looking pretty impressive and a far cry from Euston Station today.
• BBC (1966) Euston staff colour bar ended.
• 1968 Brochure for the opening of the redeveloped Euston Train Station.
• Morrison, R. (2007) Euston: we have a problem, Times Online, April 10th 2007.
• Euston Arch website.
• Cain, Joe. 2007. "History of Euston Grove," Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London.