Tag: Kings Cross

Early to Rise ….

Several readers of my blog threw up their hands in horror in reading of our horrid journey-from-London-to-Yorkshire-that-wasn’t yesterday. The frightfulness we and hundreds and hundreds of others encountered made the national news. So I thought I’d bring the story up to date.

Today was easy. The train company, LNER had announced that anybody affected yesterday could, for the next two days, catch any train that would reach their intended destination. We imagined that every one of these trains would be full to bursting, standing room only. Unless … we travelled early.

So….

5.00 a.m. Catch the first train of the day from Hither Green.

5.30 a.m. Arrive London Bridge tube station as entrance gates clatter open, and take escalator to Northern Line.

Wait on platform till 5.45 for train to Kings Cross., with just a few scuttling mice for company.

6.00 a.m. Catch train bound for Edinburgh, which takes us to the station nearest our home.

Near York, begin to understand what yesterday’s difficulties were about.

8.55 leave train to be met by a friend who arrives with his car to spirit us home - the long way round because of flooding. Nearing home, we see a rainbow ….

9.29: Arrive home.

Perhaps this proves the truth of that old saying about the early bird who catches the worm. I only wish I’d taken Before and After shots of the concourse at Kings Cross Station yesterday (maelstrom) and today (perfect peace). Two nervous little Country Mice are rather glad to have finally scuttled home.

London Gasholders

I was in London yesterday, but due to travel back to Yorkshire from King’s Cross when Judith’s blog Beyond the Window Box tumbled into my in-box. She’d been exploring the area round the station, just alongside Regent’s Canal, and found some gasholders…..

As a child, these fascinated me.  Those circular cast iron skeletons, housing storage cylinders which telescoped up and down depending on how much gas they contained were a source of wonder to me.  Though assertively industrial, they were graceful too, rising above the narrow terraced houses and the factories and trades which grew up alongside them. But ‘Gasworks Street’ was nobody’s idea of a smart address.

The King’s Cross gasholders in their workaday world.

How things change.  Gasholders London is a site transformed from its dirty, workaday past into a smart desirable residential quarter.  All but one of the gasholders now contain not gas cylinders, but luxury apartments.  The remaining one has become a small  park with a gleaming reflective canopy with grass beneath.

Nobody seems to want to hide the area’s busy industrial past.  The über-smart shopping quarter, just being developed on the site of the cobbled streets and railway sidings where coal from the North of England was received and sorted is called Coal Drops Yard.

Gasholders London, seen from the Regent’s Canal.

Round here, if you need to know the price, you can’t afford it.  A hundred and fifty years of dramatic social change.

Canal boats and houseboats are part of the local scene.
Day to day life goes on. Here’s a bike park round the corner from Gasholders London. It’s next to the local primary school.

Click on any image for a closer view.