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

ABC Wednesday - Olympic Symbols

Come through the entrance to St Pancras station in London, look up to be amazed at William Barlow's single span elliptical roof and see some rings have appeared. Bit dull?

Come round the other side and here are the Olympic rings in full colour. John Betjeman's statue has temporarily got more than the shed roof to look at.  An appropriate combination for no doubt if still alive then he would probably be attending the Poetry Olympics Enlightenment Marathon or the Olympic Parnassus when it is hoped that a poet from all 204 nations competing at this year's London sporting Olympics will come together with a poem, although there are 23 countries lacking a representative so the search goes on from American Samoa to Vanuatu, a call has gone out to find the missing poets here

When we were in London the Olympic countdown clock was at 196 days now we are down to two figures - 93

and on the other side the Paralympics was 229 days away, now its only 126.

I couldn't feature a statute of John Betjeman without a poem so here he is dreaming of his 'Olympic Girl'

  

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet

 

ABC Wednesday - Paul DAY

 Paul Day's "The Meeting Place" was one of the statues commissioned for the recently refurbished Victorian railway station of St Pancras in London.  Day shows himself and his half-French wife Catherine representing a French woman reunited with her English lover, symbolising the meeting of two cultures and the romance of travel.  This is a station that the French and English do meet because the Eurostar trains departs and finishes here, travelling back and forward from the two countries under the Channel Tunnel.  The statue is huge 20 tonnes and 9 metres high,  it needs to be because the William Barlow's St Pancras shed of 1868 is on a monumental scale.  The statue is one that is both loved and hated.  I'm now going to leave the luscious St Pancras architecture, glimpsed in the background, for later in this round of ABC Wednesday but instead show some of the reliefs around the frieze at the bottom of the statue, all continuing the theme of people meeting in a public spaces  

 The men who built the railways

 I think this is supposed to be a railway driver and two people waiting on a station

 The underground rush hour commute, and lastly

meetings on stairways.

An entry to ABC Wednesday, Round 10, a journey from A to Z...