Kings Cross, what shall we do?

King's Cross!
What shall we do?
His Purple Robe
Is rent in two!

For me, there are areas of London that retain a tangible vibration of what has gone before: so close to the surface that you can be physically and emotionally struck by it. Some of this is from my own personal experiences, some of it inherited from my forbears, some of it just from collective emotion over the centuries.

Kings Cross is not a place I know that well but whenever I have been there it has had an air of gloom: it seems to me that however much you tart it up there is an undercurrent of darkness. Tacitus records it as a place of battle between Boudica and the Romans.




 It is bleak, drab and depressing.

Consider the misery and filth of Somers Town, where Dan Leno was born in 1860. When the Duke of Bedford was developing his Bloomsbury estate he was moved to erect a 'cordon sanitaire' to keep out the undesirables

The Polygon, shown here on the 1799 map as pretty much on the edge of London.

The Polygon was a housing estate, a Georgian building with 15 sides and three storeys that contained 32 houses.
Mary Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, in the Polygon.  Charles Dickens lived at No 17 in the 1820s shortly after his father, John Dickens, was released from debtors prison.

It was demolished in the 1890s, by which time Somers Town had become a cheap and run-down neighbourhood, almost entirely because of its location. Railways were loud and smelly places, and they depended upon cheap labour - and that combination was a killer for an area's aspirations.




It is still a housing estate, the Somers Town Estate was built over it  

Kings Cross has a large and active Chinese community

In the beginning of 2010 Chinese authorities announced a bold plan to link Chinese high speed national railway directly to London King's Cross international railway station. This would allow passengers to reach London from Beijing in just two days.