Reminds me of a tale of a 19th Century Chess player who was at an American city for a tournament. He did not like his hotel room and wandered around until he found a hotel room he liked. He then went to get a porter to transfer his luggage, only to find that the room he liked was downstairs from the room he disliked in the same hotel.

I met a taxi driver in Warrington who said he'd taken Alex Hurricane Higgins from Warrington Bank Quay to the Patton Arms hotel just over the road (a duration just enough for the passenger to light a cigarette).

I directed an American (after dark) to the Victoria Coach Station by telling him "See on the opposite corner of this crossroads there's a building with a whit e light?" "Yes" "That's it."

@@PMA65537 Sometimes that's all you need! 👍

A similar thing happened to me, but it was in Mumbai, but didn't involve a taxi, or a train station.

I think that's the fastest a comment of mine has received a "heart" from a creator. Jago is on top of things, as usual. Keep up the good work! 👍

I've watched loads of your videos and didn't realise you ever lived in "real" London!

​@@adamkimber5853and did the exact opposite commute to most people

The view from the road is not obscured, although personally I am surprised that entrance wasn't removed as it's ugly. There are 3 entrances but one of them was built one-way for some bizarre reason.

One of things in front of it is a Pret coffee outlet

@@molybdomancer195 nothing like the scale of the "temporary" structure that was there before. It is in fact the largest public square in Central London. (Don't get me started on nearly all of these squares not being square. Soho Square is square I think)

The first time that I saw King's Cross, I thought it was a fairly recent structure so I was surprised when I found out how old it was. As you said, quite timeless, modern. And to me, an attractive station.

@@hairyairey Russell Square is pretty square. As for the others: maybe rectangle just doesn’t sound that great

Because of the excellent presentation. Mr Wright can make any story fascinating.

Not just stations. One of the most attractive buildings in the UK if not Europe.

Ironically, and famously, one almost demolished in the 60s!

@@cockneyse Saved largely due to the efforts of the poet Sir John Betjeman. A nice statue of him is in the station. He was unable to save the Euston Arch, but he was able to prevent the "criminal folly" of tearing down St. Pancras. That effort could make a good video...

The beautiful statue of poet and railfan John Betjeman who campaigned to stop the place being bulldozed in the 60s by barbarian planners is well worthy of the traveller's attention. God knows what would be there now. A brutalist concrete office block perhaps?

It's one of the most beautiful buildings in London, was there today and as you come down the hill from Angel It's stunning.

What station even comes close?

remember the old Great Western Hotel

@@Genevasplaytime The Lloyd’s Building, of course (joking)

@@Genevasplaytime I would say, That looks at least equal as beautiful and grand is Paddington. At least in terms of the train shed. Victoria doesn’t look as beautiful anymore.

Exactly. Just as in The Duke of Norfolk’s ancestral home is in Sussex, and Leeds Castle is in Kent.

@@AtheistOrphan But Leeds Castle is next to Leeds village.

@@craigmarriott6759 - True. About 5 miles west of Maidstone.

I was disappointed with both Bushey and Sandy stations for exactly that reason!

A wonderful example of Tartarian building and craftsmanship - you got to hand it to those Giants.

Thank god it was saved

Some of it has been turned into expensive flats

@@peterbutcher2573 no thanks at all, it should have been pulled down along with the west flank of King's Cross and turned into a single giant terminus to serve all main lines north of London. It was obsolete the day it opened, never made money, quickly closed and then lingered on for a century as mostly empty offices before finally being turned into yet another expensive modern hotel in an area already saturated with them... bloody thing should have been pulled down long before Betjeman and the whole conservation mob got going.

Great it was saved. Such a shame that Euston was not.

Thought of you when he mentioned them, Rod!

@@jlscoyserney Yay - how you doing Jack?

@@jlscoyserney yay - how you doing Jack?

Yes, it was a consequence of crossing over the canal by a bridge instead of tunnelling under it as the Great Northern had done next door. The advantage was that trains leaving St Pancras didn't have the steep climb just as they were getting going that trains leaving King's Cross faced. The disadvantage was that the platforms at St Pancras ended up several feet above ground level. So what to use the space underneath for?

@@johnm2012 Using the space underneath as beer stores involving massive, almost biblical quantities of Burton Ale, and related activities such as bottling, was the ingenious solution. The undercroft had a relatively stable temperature, and was ideally situated - the stores were divided in two by railway lines and a turntable, and a trainful of beer came down from Burton every day.

NB: Not everyone will have the same experience in the bedrooms there as he did in the precursor to his honeymoon.

@@fiddley I trust that Mr and Mrs Main enjoyed their honeymoon very much, particularly if it was a month long as it should be.

i play this game with my nose and fat lines of cocaine. My nose is the train, the lines of cocaine are the train lines and my birds tooting annie is the station. Choo choo

'St Pancreas' is my favourite organ of the digestive system... ;) I remember before the HSTs when the place was full of Class 45s, and Class 127 Diesel-Hydraulic DMUs.

@@ajbonmg lol. Don’t you just love predictive text. 😃

Well change at Luton or Bedford and you can go into st pancras on the East Midland railway platforms, next to Eurostar

indeed. it's a fascinating part of the city

The east Midland railway doesn't have it so bad, at least they are not down in the basement with thameslink, and they are generally much faster than thameslink to bedford, despite using the same route

Crossrail 2 - if it ever happens - is slated to get a Euston St Pancras station. Platforms would run from Eversholt Street (the eastern boundary of Euston Station) to Ossulston Street, the western boundary of the British Library site, which is just the other side of Midland Road from St Pancras. There would be an entrance within St Pancras station. Once completed, you could walk from Euston Square - being integrated into Euston Station as part of HS2 - to Kings Cross without ever going above ground. I don't think they're planning any travelators though.

I made a similar comment about getting from St. Pancras/ HS1 to Euston/ HS2 to someone who thought the sun shone out of the HS2 designers' rear ends. He seemed to think that there was no point in having easy connectivity between the two when I could take a taxi. By the way, I also am not impressed by the St. Pancras Shopping Centre with trains on top! It has gone the way of airports which want me to have a shopping experience, rather than catch a plane. How I miss the old British Rail station buffets and newspaper kiosks.

Kind of like 4 stations in one in a way. Thameslink, eurostar, southeastern and east midland

When I was a lad (early 70's) St Pancras was known as the "Black Hole" and it was indeed a horrible grimy place that seemed to make the loco's and rolling stock look even dirtier than they were, I'm not surprised that there was talk demolition. Still it scrubbed up quite well !

Another thank you for the maps. As a foreigner (meaning I live outside of London though still in the U.K.), I don’t know where many of these places are. Maps greatly improve my understanding of the routes. Your work is much appreciated.

tend to agree with you - im sure everyone had their own tales of St Pancras, pre-crossrail. i quite liked the quiet around the disused station

What's the oldest stock you travelled in? Ride the then brand new Victoria Line? Lots of wooden escalators - the list goes on.

That it became known as the Bedpan line made me laugh out loud. We used to take a train to Hitchin and spend a semi-idle Saturday afternoon there now and again when I was at boarding school in Letchworth in the late 70s.

@@rjjcms1 And class 317 units were called Bedpan units on introduction, well after their teething problems were sorted out.

Kings Cross Thameslink was never a terminus. It was for through trains and the entrance is still used to reduce peak time passenger congestion.

@@hairyairey No, but if you were coming into London from Bedford, Luton or St Albans, unless you got one of the Midland Mainline expresses it was your London terminus, and people from Luton would often have rather a lot of luggage, and it got HORRENDOUSLY crowded in peak hours

BedPan ! say it like 'Handbaaaag'

And now he’s immortalised on my B-roll.

looks like he was doing a scratchcard... probably lost :p

Well as long as you don't try to get there by train from Bedford! That line has long since disappeared, unfortunately.

At least I have an idea where it is. Didn’t have a clue before

i play this game with my nose and fat lines of cocaine. My nose is the train, the lines of cocaine are the train lines and my birds tooting annie is the station. Choo choo

They had the same problem with the LNWR and so they applied to Parliament to build the Settle and Carlisle Line. When this was granted, the LNWR agreed to allow equal access to the mainline. The MR tried to get out ov the building if their new line, but Parliament insisted they go ahead with it as they were getting annoyed by the behaviour of railway companies requesting permission for lines and not building them.

With the line coming in from Cambridge as well it must have been pretty hectic in Hitchin!

@@bentilbury2002 The line between Hitchin and Bedford didn't close until the early 1960s. I think the villages that lost their stations are still all within about 5 miles or so of a mainline station.

Nah, still happens (see: Lumo). Network Rail still publishes regulation policies than can be quite punitive towards trains that are not "priority" (class 1/9 - though they are supposed to take performance considerations into this, but this generally only happens after much fussing has happened).

did you catch RUSH over here back then?

When did the Doncaster to york line part of the east coast mainline that they use today get built?

@@johnnyboy3949 from what I can work out, as the history of the GNR's line from London to Yorkshire is complicated by the great loops they took through Lincolnshire. Peterborough to Retford opened 1848. Retford ro Dincaster opened in 1849. Peterborough to London 1850 with the current King's Cross being reached 2 years later. Also opened in 1848 was the stretch North iv Doncaster to Stocksbrige. The L&Y line from Knottingley opened in 1848 and the Y&NMR line from Leeds to Selby opened in 1839 and to York in 1840. The last stretch to open was the Sekby Bypass which opened in 1983, but that replaced part of the former Y&NMR line.

I’d not heard that, but on the railway architecture programmes on Yesterday a couple of years back, they commented that St Pancras was initially to be built from materials bought down from the midlands, mostly Nottingham and Derby I think, but it started getting expensive so London brick was used but where it wouldn’t be seen. To be fair, I pass the Midland Station in Nottingham every morning on my ride in to work, and that is also a pretty stunning piece of architecture and positively glows since the refurbishment. the entrance to Leicester is similar (although was in a very sorry state last time I saw it).. shame about the rest of it.. and god knows what happened in Derby lol

@@johnd6487 The blood red facing bricks were made at Mapperley brickworks in Nottingham and the parabolic iron ribs for the roof were made in Butterley, Derbyshire. The cheaper bricks would have been made near Bedford.

Urban myth. But no doubt Scott's experience building churches stood him in good stead.

Unlike some other old railway lines, the track north from Hitchin towards Bedford doesn't look like a disused line now - just a very straight footpath along a flat bit of countryside.

The CWL were built by the Metropolitan and were originally known as the Metropolitan Widened Lines as far as I recall.

yeah similar vintage for my trip to St Pancras - difficult to imagine how it was - I've also got some hazy memories of kings x and victoria from late 70s school trips - if you see ww2 films/50s movies am sure there was not huge amount of difference , blackened concrete concourse floors (flattened chewing gum) wh smiths kiosks with an array of sweets and papers - don't recall much in way of fast food tbh = was pleasantly surprised by new food court/beer hall in arcade opposite Vic station last summer - I used to go to same arcade for great sandwich shop in mid 90s - but also recall a video arcade late 70s there the "Golden Goose"

Shame the Bedford-Hitchin line isn't there any more. From memory that's a very flat part of the country as well.

It’s on my list! I want to look at the big termini in general, they all have interesting stories.

@@JagoHazzard You could start with the Monopoly stations first? I always wanted to visit those as a child in the north as they seemed famous enough to be on the Monopoly board.

@@archstanton6102 Then if he ventures beyond trains, Tate Modern for the Electric Company and the Embankment (built at least partially to conceal sewers) for the Water Company? Then the nearest underground station to each street on the board...

@@mittfh I sense a series coming on.

@@JagoHazzard - See last weeks episode of Britain’s Most Expensive Homes (Channel 4).

Ooh I didn't know that! Was that the Nightingale? That shut a few years ago. The Molly Malones down the road used to be called the Gloucester Arms, but I doubt that was a railway thing!

Was given this info by a local historian but when quickly searching previously named pubs it can't be qualified. Better let Jago know.

No, the International link is very recent.

NYC has two mainline and commuter rail stations, Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal. The metro connection between them requires a long walk and a transfer.

It wasn’t you at 2:58 littering then?

@@dalejenner5751 No, but that's some damn fine littering tho!

Never getting the recognition one is due

i play this game with my nose and fat lines of cocaine. My nose is the train, the lines of cocaine are the train lines and my birds tooting annie is the station. Choo choo

St Pancras in the 1960s and 1970s was grim, particularly in the evening, when the lighting was abysmal and the ticket hall was a bit intimidating.

The actual cross at King's Cross was a ceremonial arch thinggy in honour of George iv. Hence the Kings bit. Charing was a queen Eleanor cross, the preceding one is Waltham Cross, also one of the few surviving crosses

Part of the graveyard of St. Pancras old church was needed for the railway line. A young Thomas Hardy was made responsible for overseeing the exhumation of the bodies buried there. The headstones were arranged around a tree, the so-called Hardy tree.

They’re like the Where’s Wally of the channel.

After reading this comment, I went back and clicked a pretty much random part of the video, trying to find what you were talking about, and hey presto, it was that exact moment. What are the chances!? 2:53

@@PiousMoltar Better than Scratch Card Littering Man's, apparently

Should amalgamate all three mainline stations + HS2 Euston platforms and any future remodelling of any of the stations into one big "London Central" railway station, preferably with huge underground connections and a potential link between HS2 and HS1 railway lines. It could act as one mega railway station for most London journeys. Alas it would cost a fortune and such an idea would take 100 years to come to fruition if ever.

@@lordgemini2376 no that is the plan, however I think demand for HS1-HS2 travel is low right now. It's not difficult to join the two anyway. Anyway Farringdon is going to be the central station soon. The Euston-St Pancras station will run underground between the two but it will have to avoid the basements of the British Library.

@@hairyairey With the UK not being in schengen, or even in the EU now, there's little point running through services to Europe. You need to have some kind of passport control so may as well do it at St Pancras, you're holding up passengers either way. Perhaps one day if the UK decides it wants to go all in on the EU for whatever reason. It could certainly provide a good alternative to flights from Birmingham and Manchester to Paris or Brussels.

@@Croz89 Also building a connection would mean demolishing some considerable acreage of Camden. If the Midland Railway found that prospect expensive back in the 1880s just imagine what it would be like now!

@@Croz89 The passport control agreements for Eurostar have never had anything to do with the EU (thank God). This is why incoming passengers are checked on departure in Brussels, Paris and now Amsterdam (although I haven't been there to check in person yet). As for little point, they used to run a train service from Newcastle to Waterloo to join up with Eurostar. Only passengers with a Eurostar ticket could travel on it. I watched it leave with six passengers once. There needs to be the demand first. If sufficient people travel from Birmingham then onward to Eurostar it'll happen.

Euston-St Pancras would be the name of the station on Cross Rail 2 should it ever get built. It would be the same size as the current Crossrail/Elizabeth line stations ie huge with entrances at the end of both platforms, which is why Liverpool Street stretches to Moorgate, and Farringdon Station stretches to Barbican.

It's St PANCRAS, not Pancreas (part of the human body). I've lost count of the number of misspellings and mispronunciations I've heard over the years

@@Gary-hj2lc Sorry, I think it was an autocorrect thing.

The fact it has a real platform zero... Is more cool than the fictional 9 3/4

Yeah London buildings are so dreary. Not this 1.

It's Victorian mock-Gothic. Completely over the top and once reviled, but now very much on point. I'm an old git, so I've lived long enough to see buildings like St P once so hated as 'so Victorian' and torn down (to be replaced with genuinely ugly buildings), to now, where such buildings are cleaned and renovated to protect our glorious heritage. The odd thing is, I agreed with getting rid of them in the 60s but am now very glad we didn't. Everything has to be seen in the context of its time, I supose..

....ad the signed (long) subway route from the Picc & Vic platforms to Metropolitan platforms (unless you remember the old south end exits on the Vic and Picc platforms. :-)

@@barrieshepherd7694 I think the signed routes to the Met platforms are all bizarre and lengthy, as are/were the routes to the Thameslink platforms, allegedly for 'congestion' reasons!

@@timbounds7190 Agree I worked that out - but if you take the main signed route as opposed using the 'old' routes it's probably equivalent to missing 2 Piccadilly line trains and 3 Circle/Met. trains!

King's X is by far the more functional building... and as such, has aged far better.

@@richardharrold9736 is this a joke? Firstly both are functional all it is, is extra detailing and secondly you are the first human being I have ever met and possibly on the planet who said they find King Cross more esthetically pleasing and said St Pancras aged poorly which is one of the most baffling statements on architecture I have ever heard

@@Alex-cw3rz King's Cross makes the trainshed a feature of its façade and is devoid of unnecessary ornament. St Pancras hides its trainshed away behind London's answer to Neuschwanstein, a flight of fancy by G.G. Scott Sr which was originally designed to be even more vertiginous than it is. Zero consideration was given either to any possible need to expand or to the comfort of the hotel's guests, it always struggled to fill its rooms and ultimately closed for good in 1935, following which it mostly lay empty, some rooms used as office space, until it was condemned as unsafe in the 1980s. It then took another 20-odd years after that for restoration and conversion work to begin. Only in the last decade has it begun to make sense - and even then, they had to do so much knocking through of walls to provide bathrooms and showers, and a whole new wing had to be built on the west side to provide en-suites. Stylistically, it was already out of date by 1900, neo-Gothic was unfashionable, having been succeeded by the neo-Queen Anne style of architects like Richard Norman Shaw and John Belcher, which added to St Pancras' unpopularity with guests and passengers. It was also a constant bottleneck for southbound MML traffic, most of which had to be stopped at Bedford while platforms were freed up at the cramped, inadequate St Pancras, and this in turn forced northbound trains to be held at Bedford (there was never a non-stop London-Sheffield, for example) as it too lacked the space to handle that many trains at once. This is why Edward Watkin got the financial and political backing for the Great Central London Extension - there was a recognised need for a faster line and more capacity from London to Sheffield. After the Grouping, the LMS considered various schemes to replace its three London terminii (Euston, St Pancras, Broad Street), but the political and financial support was never there to make it happen, the long-overdue replacement of Euston (previously a confused mess of buildings and additional platforms that had grown piecemeal throughout the Victorian era) not happening until the 1960s. By that time, traffic volume on both the MML and GCR had fallen so drastically that the GCR was closed (big mistake) and St Pancras lay half empty, a filthy, crumbling shadow of its former self, loathed and avoided by passengers, who preferred to use King's Cross or Euston whenever possible. BR should have ignored Betjeman and the Victorian Society, pushed ahead with demolishing St Pancras and replacing it and the west side of King's Cross with a giant modern terminus, ideally preserving Cubitt's trainshed and façade at King's Cross.

@@richardharrold9736You are complaining that they made the building look nice. "Unnessary ornaments" are you blind, have you not seen the banding the clock tower the roof all the decoration on Kings cross, you are quite hilarious I'll give you that. Sorry did you just call a station a "trainshed" this is getting better every second. The neuschwanstein, you think the red building is meant to look like a white German immitation castle that wasn't completed until after George Gilbert Scott died 🤦‍♂️ Oh and now "vertiginous" I know you are making very poor arguments but getting out a thesaurus to make a poor replacement for more floors, is fascinating levels of insecurity you hold in yourself. Also Scott did not deisgn the station, William Henry Barlow did. Your next paragraph is just a Wikipedia page, that doesn't even talk about the station, with made up opinions, Neo-queen annes is not a thing, it's called Queen Annes revival. It was never considered better, it was never considered the only type of architecture you could make at the time, in fact it's a very rare style of architecture, that was the fashion for a lot shorter time than gothic revival, in fact Gothic revival not just lasted longer, It came about before and stop being a popular style to build (due to costs) after the entire Queen Annes Revival architecture... Again just copying a Wikipedia page because you have zero clue about the UK's railways. Yeah King Cross famous for it's easabiltiy and trains not running late, oh wait sorry it's the opposite as with every station in the country, especially ones that are the end of a line. Your final paragraph sayings nothing, but because of poor funding it looked shaby, there was another station just like that it started with King something. Then both these stations were refurbished and oh yeah they aren't half empty, unless you pretend it's the 1980s. You talk about imitation and then you say they should have had two identical looking stations. I can do nothing but laugh at a foo l like you. Also I'd like you to tell other people in your life you think St Pancras should have been demolished and replaced with a brutalist box and a photocopy of King's Cross go on, people will think you are unwell.

@@richardharrold9736 this is fascinating I watched your video and you are actually British this is amazing you talk and act like an ignorant old age American pensioner.