Attached to St. Pancras station in London is a huge victorian Gothic style building, it is the old hotel that was operated by the Midlands Railway. Eventually when the hotel closed it became offices and now its empty but listed as a Grade 1 historic building.
The hotel was one of the best in London in Victorian times complete with many unique features like a revolving door and hydrolic lift. The hotel opened in 1873 and was revolutionary for it’s day, unfortunately it was built before en suite bathrooms and central heating and eventually it closed down because it was not profitable anymore to operate a 300 room hotel that relied on chamber maids to carry pans of coals into all the rooms for heat.
Renovating the building is very difficult due to the construction methods used and because there are almost no plumbing anywhere, there were shared bathrooms but most people had a bath wheeled into their room and taken out again when they were done.
The exterior of the building was restored in the nineties at a cost of £10 million, there are still some exterior work going on today. There are plans to incorporate it into the new Marriott hotel that is being built to compliment the new Eurostar rail link that is coming into St Pancras stations.
Today tours are being run over weekends of small parts of the hotel, I would suggest anyone who can go on the tour as it may soon close due to the work on the new hotel and so forth.
I took some photos while I was there, you can see a few here.
More about the building and the general site can be read at LCR Properties who manages the site, or some more in depth history can be found here.
