Growing up in Camden (in north London) in the 1960s and 1970s, the streets immediately north and east of Kings Cross and St. Pancras stations were no-go areas.  They were popular with drug dealers, prostitutes, their customers, and no one else.  I worked for a short time in the neighborhood in 1982 and even then it was a grim place. I remember walking up Pentonville Road at lunchtime one day and seeing someone shooting up in a doorway, oblivious to the passers-by.  It was that kind of place. The railway arches were home to various small businesses, especially car repair shops.  I remember a particularly gruesome episode of the TV series Prime Suspect being set in one of the arches – a perfect setting for sinister dealings.

Regeneration was slow to arrive.  When the British Library opened its new building on a plot immediately to the west of St Pancras station in 1998, I expected it to spur a wider renaissance of the area, but nothing very much seemed to happen until the new Eurostar terminal was built.  With that, and with the refurbishment of the St Pancras hotel, Gilbert Scott’s Victorian Gothic masterpiece, the tide of modernization was unstoppable.  Today the area is home to new hotels, restaurants, and bars and almost every vestige of the old and seedy has been wiped away, replaced with shiny offices for Google and Amazon.  I’ve been back there a few times recently and such is the extent of the transformation that it’s almost impossible to trace the streets that I remember forty years ago.  A place that once existed no longer does, except in my memory.

No one could possibly lament the disappearance of the old neighborhood, but amid all the gains – the well-lighted, safe streets, the public art, the energy that comes when a new generation of visitors discovers and claims a previously unknown part of central London – something has been lost.  Kings Cross and St Pancras today are shiny and new, but aren’t they also a little bland?  Isn’t it just a little regrettable that when we talk about regeneration what we usually mean is more expensive apartments, more offices, more restaurants and bars?  Does regeneration have to mean gentrification and uniformity?

History is inescapable in London and that’s what makes it one of the world’s truly great cities.  Amazing work has been done to preserve London’s magnificent old buildings from every era, but something of the great industrial heritage of Kings Cross and St Pancras has been lost forever.  For some reason that feels quite personal.