St Pancras Station, London NW1
GEORGE GILBERT SCOTT’S Midland Hotel and Barlow’s train shed created the finest railway terminal in England. The hotel was closed in 1935, narrowly avoided demolition in the 1960s, occupied by British Rail until 1985, and then abandoned. Neglect can sometimes be benign, however, as the station thereby avoided late-20th-century modernisation. Its superb restoration, combined with the sympathetic re-use of the train shed, provided a two-storey shopping mall, platforms for Eurostar and a new Tube station. The result is a glorious fusion of new and old: the best of all worlds. Giles Quarme, Giles Quarme & Associates
Oldham Town Hall, Greater Manchester
OLDHAM, the ultimate 19th-century cotton-spinning town, has had a tough time over the past 60 years, despite its many assets. One of these is the noble Classical Town Hall, with a series of great interiors that includes a superb faience Egyptian Room. It was shuttered for decades and increasingly derelict, until the council took the brave decision to invest public money in a scheme to convert it as a cinema, saving a great historic building and bringing activity and life back to the heart of Oldham. Here, the very fact of the restoration is something worth celebrating. If our fractured country is to heal, we need much more of this. Christopher Costello, director, Victorian Society
Welsh Streets, Liverpool
This story is from the November 20, 2019 edition of Country Life UK.
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This story is from the November 20, 2019 edition of Country Life UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
