1st October: Opening of St Pancras railway station

On 1st October 1868 St Pancras railway station in London was formally opened as a terminus of the Midland Railway. 10 things you may not know about St Pancras station:

Photograph © Andrew Dunn, 27 October 2004.

1. When it was first built it was the largest enclosed space in the world (The William Barlow designed train shed arch spans 240 feet and is over 100 feet high at its apex).
2. The station contains 60 million bricks. All the bricks were made in Nottingham.
3. Because approaching trains had to cross the Regents Canal, the lines at the station are 12 to 17 ft (3.7 to 5.2 m) above ground level. Originally, the space underneath them was just going to be filled with rubble from the building works, but due to high value of land in the area, it was used for storage of freight, and in particular, Beer.
4. It was very nearly demolished in the 1960s, but there was a successful campaign to save it led by the future Poet Laureate, John Betjeman. This is why there is a statue of him in the station.
5. On the subject of art in the station, the frieze around the bottom of Paul Day's The Meeting Place (the statue of a couple Kissing) was originally going to contain a depiction of someone falling or jumping under a train driven by the Grim Reaper. This was revised before it was installed, presumably because someone pointed out to Day that it was in rather bad taste.
6. On one of the outside walls there is a replica of a nose. The nose belongs to the artist Rick Buckley, who created about 35 plaster of Paris noses and stuck them to public buildings in 1997 in protest at the number of CCTV cameras in London. The one at St Pancras is one of only about ten which still survive.
7. The station has a famous clock, which is actually a replica of the one in the original station. A rich American bought the original in the 1980s for £250,000, but as it was being taken down so the American could ship it home, it fell and broke, so the deal fell through. However, a railway engineer from Nottinghamshire took the parts home in a wheelbarrow and rebuilt it. It now adorns the side of his barn.
8. The name of the station is so often mispronounced (as St Pancreas) that the stations public relations team commissioned a study into mispronounced words in March 2014.
9. The station is home to Searcy’s Champagne Bar, the longest champagne bar in Europe at 96m long and 110 seats. It sells around 1,000 glasses a day.
10. The station is named after a church, St Pancras Old Church, one of the oldest churches in Britain. The church was dedicated to a Roman boy who was beheaded for his faith at the age of 14, and whose name means "the one that holds everything". His feast day is on May 14 and he is the patron saint of children, jobs and health and invoked against cramp, false witness, headaches and perjury.