King’s Cross has really gone up in the world. The station itself has been wonderfully re-invented, St Pancras, too, as it has taken over as the terminal for the Eurostar. Both truly top-class railway stations. And now the development has spread north towards the Regent’s Canal. Rejoice! There is a new luxury shopping centre in the old Coal Drops Yard. Ok, I’m being sarcastic. (Could you guess?) The old warehouses of this area have been rennovated and fresh life has been breathed into it. I was excited when I began looking around. And then my heart sank with the realisation that it was just another posh shopping precinct, with a theme. Great. That’s just what London needed.
It used to be really very scuzzy around here. When I first explored King’s Cross in the 1980’s, it wasn’t a place I wanted to spend any time. Everything looked unused and run down, and grubby-looking prostitutes and dealers with sly eyes openly plied their trades. I found it a bit scary to be honest. In the 1990’s it became a hub for the new rave scene. I was probably a bit old to indulge in the pleasure it offered at that point, though I am pretty sure that I ended up here in Bagleys club at some point on the extremely alcoholic night when my brother and I wetted my first baby’s head. I can’t remember much about it except the music was so loud that my bones sook in my body and I was so drunk that we didn’t stay long and ended up going to Smashing and a whole bunch of other places instead. It was that kind of night. My brother new a lot of pop stars at the time and we kept bumping into them. They all seem amazed that somebody our age had a kid. The Gallagher brothers bought me a beer. And I had a really earnest conversation with Pulp’s drummer and a couple of members of Sleeper. It was 1995. It all felt very cool. But I was glad to get away from Bagleys.
So I didn’t exactly have a close relationship with Coal Drops Yard, in fact I wasn’t even aware of its name. It comes from the fact that much of London’s coal arrived here in the nineteenth century on the new trains from the northern and western coalfields to be bagged up and distributed across the city. This is where the coal was dropped off to be stored in these warehouses.
After my initial pleasure at discovering the Yard and enjoyment of the marvellous shapes of the modern additions designed by Heatherwick Studios (responsible for the incredible flame holder at the 2012 Olympics) and subsequent groan when I realised it was all to house posh shops, I wandered round and found that, despite myself, I was enjoying the new development.
You can still cutthrough the arches to the Canal, St Pancras lock has been spruced up and there are some lovely new apartments that have been sympathetically built within the old gasholders that sit on the Canal side.
Its not a plce of industry any more, nor is it seedy. Hedonism has packed its bag and left. But Coal Drops Yard is, I think, yet another good development in the Kings Cross area.
