Saint Pancras Station and Old Church: Architecture as Moral Statement

Saint Pancras Station: From Infernal Machine to Secular Cathedral

Viewing the nineteenth-century architecture of Saint Pancras Station from the vantage of the early twenty-first century, the seeming proud grandeur of the design can blind us to the strange and difficult reception this architecture had among contemporary critics. In the 1870s, the legendary Victorian art critic John Ruskin is reported to have remarked, "At Paddington station I felt as if in hell" (Pearce 63). Presumably Ruskin was alluding to the vast urban architecture of Milton's depiction of Pandemonium — the city built in hell by the fallen angels of Paradise Lost — a magnificent but morally wicked architectural achievement. This is also why, earlier in the Industrial Revolution, Blake had inveighed against the "dark Satanic mills," which possessed a monumental grandeur in service of a wicked purpose. To enter Saint Pancras Station in 2015, however, may very well produce the opposite effect: the building feels like a cathedral built not to glorify God but the railway.

Historical context is all important here. For Ruskin, the rapid construction of railway stations in the Victorian era signaled the rapid destruction of what remained of England's natural beauty. By the twenty-first century, the grandeur of railway travel suggested by this secular Victorian cathedral now actually maintains a kind of moral superiority. If we are committed to "green" ideas and to the kind of Burkean-cum-ecological approach to the natural environment that Ruskin himself advocated, then it becomes clear that railways remain a vast improvement over automobiles — and are strangely beloved by the British population. From Thomas the Tank Engine to Shining Time Station to David Hare's The Permanent Way to trainspotters nationwide, Britain as a nation retains a certain reverence for railway travel in 2015 that would be unfamiliar in Germany or the United States.

The architectural meaning of Saint Pancras is, in fact, somewhat ironic: at the time it was built, the most important critic in England thought it was the devil's own work. Roughly a century and a half after this station was built — and roughly a half-century after it was slated for demolition by Britain's postwar urban planners — this pretentious red-brick birthday cake (looking like the bastard child of the Palace of Westminster begotten upon the main quad of Keble College Oxford) somehow remains a beloved national monument in 2015.

Ruskin, Railways, and the Moral Inversion of Victorian Architecture

As we begin our walk at Saint Pancras Station, we must start with Ruskin's deepest insight as a critic of art and design: to a certain degree, aesthetic choices are also moral choices. Ruskin despised the Victorian railway terminals of London because they represented the erasure of the natural countryside in the name of unrestricted capitalist "progress." Ironically, railways now seem like Britain's best chance to preserve the natural countryside — the moral meaning of this secular cathedral has thus been inverted, and Ruskin would very likely approve of the meaning Saint Pancras Station presently holds within the cultural context of 2015.

Yet the case is slightly different when we move nearby to Saint Pancras Old Church, which gives its name to the neighborhood. This church is claimed to be the oldest in England; the architectural information posted outside suggests it possibly dates back as early as the fourth century, making it roughly contemporary with the historical Saint Patrick. If this is true, then the modesty of its architecture does seem to indicate a greater closeness to the historical Christianity that held the meek would inherit the earth: this is not Saint Paul's or Westminster Abbey.

Saint Pancras Old Church: Antiquity, Bricolage, and the Ship of Theseus

Approaching this church, however, one must wonder whether we are faced with a real-world example of the famous logical paradox known as the Ship of Theseus: every element of this building has presumably been rebuilt, redesigned, or replaced in some way, so what is the precise meaning of claiming it as a fourth-century site from early Christians in Roman Britain? One of the historical quirks of Saint Pancras Old Church is that it permitted the burial of Roman Catholics after their religion was outlawed in the sixteenth century. Perhaps its great antiquity suggests a kind of primordial sanctity that transcends sectarian differences in the human imagination, offering a form of sanctuary at the height of religiously motivated hostilities within English society (Saint Pancras Old Church, 2015).

But this is a matter of the lingering cultural meaning or sanctity that may outlast the original purpose of an architectural monument. Whatever collective meaning of ritual worship originally adhered to Glastonbury Abbey — that which led to the mythic belief that it housed the Holy Grail — it is now essentially a National Trust property, and the collective meaning and ritual worship have been transferred to the Glastonbury music festival. Old Saint Pancras Church seems to have maintained its reputation as a holy site since the fourth century, yet it is impossible to view the actual building and grounds as anything other than bricolage.

For example, the mausoleum of the Regency-era Neo-Classical architect Sir John Soane is located here, though his own design work is visible not far away at One Marylebone Road — built as a church but now no longer in use for that purpose (Sir John Soane, 2015). Soane's monument on the grounds of Old Saint Pancras is famous for having provided the inspiration for the form of the historic London phone boxes and Doctor Who's TARDIS (Saint Pancras Old Church, 2015). It bears no relation to anything else architecturally around it; instead it looks like a dollhouse cathedral built by a vainglorious empire-builder to house himself on sacred ground. Conceptually, it seems as strange as imagining Queen Victoria having built the Albert Memorial in the middle of Stonehenge. Yet experienced in context, it does not seem quite so bizarre — the congeries of styles are at least unified by a common purpose, one that appears to have been maintained even in an essentially post-Christian Britain.

References

Larkin, Philip. 2003. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.

Leader, Zachary. 2006. The Life of Kingsley Amis. London: Jonathan Cape.

Pearce, Joseph. 2000. The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. London: Harper Collins.

Wikipedia. "Old Saint Pancras Church." Last modified April 3, 2015. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Pancras_Old_Church [Accessed April 24, 2015].

Wikipedia. "Saint Pancras Railway Station." Last modified April 17, 2015. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Pancras_railway_station [Accessed April 24, 2015].

Wikipedia. "Sir John Soane." Last modified April 20, 2015. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Soane [Accessed April 25, 2015].