ABCWednesday - St Pancras

 This week for ABC Wednesday I'm taking you on a journey to these dreaming spires designed by George Gilbert Scott. 

Walk past the five star hotel entrance,

 first looking up to those wonderful sort of Italianate Gothic windows, (see its sumptuous interior in this video trip here)

But look at the time - lets walk

 through to St Pancras Station

Past the booking office which is now a bar.

to  the John Betjeman statue by the sculptor Martin Jennings, the statue commemorates the poet's successful campaign to save the station from demolition in the 1960s, an era when we lost many Victorian buildings. The 2-metre (6 ft 7 in)-high statue stands on a flat disc slate from my own county of Cumbria inscribed with lines from Betjeman's poem Cornish Cliffs:

"And in the shadowless unclouded glare / Deep blue above us fades to whiteness where / A misty sea-line meets the wash of air".  

The sky blue of the paint is close to the original colour applied in 1868-77 , the colour which the designer of the railway shed William Henry Barlow chose was so when passengers looked up on a fine day the structure would melt away in the sky.  The statue gazes up into Barlow's roof

which on the day I took this was dull (although one of the Olympic rings was blue) but you can always rely on finding a sunny day photo on

Wikipedia, complete with Eurostar trains, about to wizz off to the continent.

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey from A to Z