King’s Cross London Pub Walk – History & Hidden Gems

King's Cross sounds like it should have an ancient, heroic origin story, but the name comes from a mocked 1830 monument demolished fifteen years after it was built. 

This episode traces the incredible arc of one of London's great train station neighborhoods. From open countryside to Victorian industrial powerhouse, decades of post-industrial abandonment, street prostitution, and a fatal Underground fire that killed thirty-one people. Finally reinvigorated as a global benchmark for urban regeneration. 

Along the way, our story takes in, a lot! Boudica's alleged burial ground at Platform 9¾. The graveyard where Mary Shelley fell in love and modern science fiction was born. A Welsh drifter found near the station in 1943 who became a World War Two spy after his death. The poet laureate who saved St Pancras from demolition with days to spare. Shane MacGowan founding the Pogues in a local pub, and fifteen regulars who bought their own pub to stop it becoming a coffee shop. Oh — and Elvis is barred from one of them. The reasons are not recorded. We manage to stop at several historic pubs along the way, because as always it's the pubs that survive to tell the tales of evolving neighborhoods.

Transcript

From the 1960s to the 1980s in Britain, we understood an unwritten rule. When your train reached the railway terminus, you left the area fast. Station areas were not places to linger, they were scruffy, slightly threatening in between zones. If you told my teenage self that London's King's Cross would one day be among the country's most desirable addresses. With global companies, a leading art college, and canal side brunch spots, I wouldn't have believed you, and I would have asked,

"Dad, what's brunch?"

That transformation was not accidental, it came from a complete shift in how planners and governments treat land around stations. To understand it we need to see how things got so bad.

Today we're at King's Cross St. Pancras. One station or two. We're exploring its rise, fall, and remarkable revival. I've also thrown in a cask ale pub crawl the area while we walk!

ACT ONE - A RIDICULOUS MONUMENT, A WARRIOR QUEEN, AND THE GRAVEYARD THAT MADE THE FUTURE

This is your host, Expat Andy, broadcasting from Miami in the Sunshine State. My job is to be your insider guide to the London that doesn't make it onto the highlight reel, the London that's hidden in plain sight, if you know where to look.

Before we begin, a reminder to please share this episode with others you think might love it. Also, a heads up. This is the last episode in season one, and then we're taking a hiatus for about a month while we work on logistics for season two. If you're a London local and want to be featured as a guest contributor in season two, email me expatandy at publicithepodcast.com.

King's Cross sounds ancient, but it's actually a relatively recent and slightly embarrassing name.

As late as 1746, this was open countryside on London's edge, dotted with hamlets like Battle Bridge. That older name carries more history. The river fleet once ran through here, crossed at Broadford Bridge, later Battle Bridge, eventually spawning a legend that this was where the Romans defeated Boudica in 60 or 61 AD.

There's no evidence for that, though folklore still claims she's buried between platforms nine or ten, roughly platform nine and three quarters at King's Cross Station.

The name King's Cross comes from a far less heroic source, an 1830 monument to King George IV at a major crossroads. Sixty feet tall, though the eleven foot statue of the King wasn't added until 1835. It was widely mocked. The base of the monument served as a police station and then as a pub. By 1845 the monument was demolished, but when the Great Northern Railway decided to call their new terminus here King's Cross Station, the neighborhood's identity was fixed forever.

A neighborhood named after a failed monument to an unpopular King, well that feels like a fitting beginning.

Before the railway made this neighborhood, another industry did. The tanneries and cattle markets that filled these streets left their trace in the pub on Judd Street, The Skinners Arms, 114 Judd Street, WC 1H9NT. It's named for The Worshipful Company of Skinners, one of the great medieval fur trade guilds. But the street itself is named for a specific man, Sir Andrew Judd, who came to London from Tunbridge in 1511 as a fur trade apprentice, became master of the Skinners Company six times, served as Lord Mayor in 1550, and then bought the farmland this neighborhood stands on, the Sand Hills Estate, and left it in trust to fund a school in his hometown. Tunbridge School opened in 1553 with sixteen pupils. The land he bought became Judd Street, Tonbridge Street, Hastings Street, Hunter Street. Every road sign in this grid is a fragment of a Tudor merchant's estate map.

The pub itself has a Victorian tiled fireplace, stained glass windows and wood paneling throughout, six hand pumps, rotating guest ails, quality food. There is a large model camel on the roof. The camel's connection to the fur trade is unexplained.

Quietly exceptional, worth finding before the slightly more Gothic stations take over.

One more thing about The Skinners, they have disputed sixth place in the Order of the City of London Livery Companies with The Merchant Tailors since 1327. In 1484, the argument boiled over during a ceremonial procession on The Thames. The two guilds jostled for position on the river until the brawl moved to dry land and apprentices from both sides died. Lord Mayor Robert Billesdon resolved it by decreeing they should simply alternate sixth and seventh every year. Smart man. They still do to this day. Some claim the phrase at sixes and sevens derives from this. It probably doesn't since Chaucer used a similar phrase in the 1380s.

The pub is named for men who killed each other over a seating arrangement. Nobody would stand for it, which was, of course, the problem.

Behind the stations between Pancras Road and the Regent's Canal lies a small, often missed churchyard. St. Pancras Old Church has been a site of Christian worship since approximately 314 AD, making it one of Britain's oldest. Its graveyard is otherworldly and dense with literary history. In one corner once stood The Hardy Tree, an ash surrounded by stacked Victorian gravestones. A young Thomas Hardy in 1865, not yet the author of Far From The Madding Crowd, but a young architectural assistant, was given the grim task of clearing graves to make way for the Midland Railway's new line right through the churchyard. The Hardy Tree fell in 2022, but the stones remain. Nearby is the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She died in 1797 shortly after childbirth. Her daughter Mary grew up visiting this grave, reading her mother's books. It was here in 1814 that she and Percy Bysshe Shelley first declared their love before eloping to France. Two years later, Percy urged her to write a ghost story during a stormy stay in Switzerland with Lord Byron. She wrote Frankenstein. Modern science fiction begins in part in a graveyard behind King's Cross.

Before the railway arrived, there was a brief window 1837 to 1839 when one of the most important addresses in English literary history sat a short walk from the future station. 48 Doughty Street, now the Charles Dickens Museum, was home to a 24-year-old journalist, Charles Dickens, newly famous and renting it for £80 a year. Here he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. As a child, Dickens had lived nearby in poverty. From Doughty Street he could walk to to Saffron Hill and see the slums he was describing at the bottom of what is now Farendon Road. Fagin's den was set in Field Lane at its base. Dickens wasn’t inventing that world—he was recording it.

The streets that Dickens was walking were already old. There is a pub on Lloyd Baker Street whose history goes back to the same neighborhood he was documenting. Licensed since the 1740s, The Union Tavern, at 52 Lloyd Baker Street, WC1X9AA. The building that preceded it on this corner was the Black Bull. A Victorian account of the neighborhood describes it as a public house of low repute, a resort of thieves and other vicious characters. It became the Union in 1807. The Victorian interior that survives, the Union Tavern mosaic floor in the vestibule, the ironwork lettering above the door, the island bar counter, the engraved mirrors, the original fireplaces, the Lincrusta ceiling in the former saloon, dates from the 1877 to 78 rebuild. A Victorian water tap is still fixed to the bar counter. It no longer has a handle. The building sits directly above the buried course of the River Fleet. The valley contour is visible from the door. The land rises steeply up Lloyd Baker Street to the left. The river is in a brick tunnel beneath King's Cross Road, heading south to the Thames at Blackfriars. From the front door of the Union Tavern, you can see the late-Georgian streets of the Lloyd Baker estate climbing the hill, pedimented villas in piers built to follow the Fleet Valley contour. In the 2011 film of John le Carré’s Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, those streets became George Smiley's neighborhood. The choice was deliberate, faded, respectable, slightly melancholy Georgian terraces as a visual metaphor for fraying institutions and quiet betrayals. King's Cross in the 1970s, as seen through a Cold War thriller lens.

Two minutes north on King's Cross Road, a flight of steps runs up from the pavement. Arnold Bennett set his 1923 novel, Riceyman Steps, here. A miserly secondhand bookseller who marries the widow across the street. Both of them slowly starve to death, despite gold coins locked in the safe. Bennett used the exact geography of this neighborhood. The steps are still there.

Before we go into the stations, there’s one more stop. Two minutes from Granary Square, down a side street, there is a pub that has nothing to do with any of this. The Queen’s Head, 66 Acton Street, WC1X 9NB. The building dates to around 1764 — older than the United States, older than the Great Northern Railway, older than the concept of King’s Cross as a name.Grade II listed. Ornate etched-glass Victorian bay window. Original blue wall tiles. Victorian fireplace. Two battered old Charrington’s brewery lanterns outside — Charrington’s last brewed in 1975. The lanterns predate that. Jazz on Thursdays. Pork pies. CAMRA North London Pub of the Year 2022.The building was standing on this street before the railway arrived, before the goods yards, before the decline, before the regeneration. Whatever this neighborhood becomes next, it will probably still be here.

Turn left out of the door. The land rises steeply up Acton Street to the north. That contour is the buried River Fleet valley — the same river running beneath the Union Tavern we stopped at earlier in Act One. Arthur Machen, the Welsh writer and occultist who lived in this neighbourhood in the 1920s, called these streets “The Silent Land.” He wrote: “There is hardly anybody about… there are no shops here to draw people; there is a deep, leafy silence… there are short flights of steps which lead to mysterious alleys or passages or byways going to nowhere in particular.” That was 1920. Between 2014 and 2017, the Queen’s Head briefly ran its own microbrewery in the basement. Machen would have found that even more interesting than the silence.

Before it could become one of the great Victorian transport hubs, King's Cross had to absorb an industrial revolution. And in doing so, it built something extraordinary - a cathedral of coal and grain, and between the two stations, a gymnasium paid for by London's German immigrant community that hosted the first Olympic indoor games on British soil. But first: the Gothic ambition of the Midland Railway, a hotel that nearly got knocked down with a decade to spare, and the poet who stopped it happening.

Act TWO - COAL, GRAIN, AND THE BUILDING THAT ALMOST WASN'T

King's Cross Station opened in 1852, designed by Lewis Cubitt to be simple and functional, the largest in Britain at the time. Next door, the Great Northern Hotel, built in 1854, curves along Pancras Road following the now Buried River fleet.

The Great Northern Railway built the station on the site of a smallpox hospital, reflecting the area's rough reputation. By the eighteen fifties and sixties it had become a vast industrial hub. Coal from the northeast filled the Coal Drops,and Lincolnshire wheat for London bakers was stored in the Granary Building. There was a potato market and a fish depot. The whole northern end of the site was a clanging, smoking, constantly moving machine for feeding a city.

Time for a pub. Let's go into King's Cross Station to The Parcel Yard, N1C 4AP.

Up the steps past platform nine and three quarters and onto the upper concourse.  The biggest station pub in England, and located in the Grade 1 Listed railway terminus building.

Winner of CAMRA’s Pub Design Award competition in 2013, the pub occupies two floors of the Great Northern Railway's 1852 parcel sort-in office. It features Victorian skylights, upper floors suspended so horse-drawn carts could pass underneath. A Fuller's pub, it appeared in CAMRA Good Beer Guide 2014 Order from the cask range. Find a Room, Look at the Ironwork, Enjoy the comings and goings.

Between the stations, the German Gymnasium opened in 1865—the UK’s first purpose-built gym. Funded by London’s German community, it hosted early Olympic events. In 1916, as war with Germany made anything bearing a German name deeply toxic, the Great Northern Railway purchased the building and converted it to railway offices. Damaged in a Zeppelin raid, it survives today as a German-themed restaurant - its original ceiling hooks still visible above.

Across Pancras Road, the Midland Railway built its own terminus in the 1860s, hiring George Gilbert Scott.

St Pancras Station opened in 1866. Its vast trainshed designed by William Barlow was then the largest in the world. The real spectacle was The Midland Grand Hotel opened in 1873 - a towering Gothic revival red brick landmark. It featured Britain’s first revolving doors and early passenger lifts. More than a century later, its grand staircase appeared in the Spice Girls’ Wannabe video.

By 1935, outdated facilities—famously no ensuite bathrooms - imagine that horror. Well, that led to its closure. British Rail took over, then in the 1960s, another horror. They planned to demolish it.

Enter Poet Laureate John Betjeman. Railway enthusiast, and co-founder of the Victorian Society – he had failed to stop British Railways demolishing the Doric arch at Euston station in 1961. Betjeman led the campaign to protect St Pancras,calling its destruction,

“A criminal folly”. 

In 1967, it was granted Grade I status - just days before demolition.

Betjeman is memorialized in the station today with a bronze statue by Martin Jennings, unveiled when St Pancras reopened as an international terminus in 2007.

The station was saved. But the neighborhood around it was not doing well.

 ACT THREE - THE LONG DARK

While Betjeman saved St. Pancras, King's Cross itself was declining. The good yards emptied and the coal trade collapsed.

Into the vacuum came everything the city didn't want to look at. 

It’s during this period that one of the strangest stories of this neighborhood occurs. Glyndwr Michael—a Welsh drifter was found in an abandoned warehouse near King’s Cross in 1943, having eaten bread laced with rat poison. He died days later at St Pancras Hospital.

His body was given a new identity – Royal Marines Officer Major William Martin- and used in Operation Mincemeat. Planted with a briefcase of fake invasion plans, his body was released off Spain. It convinced German intelligence that the Allies would strike Greece, not Sicily. Hitler diverted troops. When the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943, casualties were far lower. This plot, conceived partly by a young naval intelligence officer named Ian Fleming – had worked.

Michael, once unknown and unwanted, is buried in Huelva, Spainas a war hero. His true identity wasn’t discovered until 1996 when an amateur historian found his name in the public records. Watch the 1956 BAFTA award winning movie made of this story - The Man Who Never Was.

That was King's Cross for much of the 20th century, a place where people fell through the cracks. Rail freight was the economic backbone of Victorian Britain. Station areas were industrial hubs built around goods yards, coal, grain, livestock, manufactured goods, parcels, milk, and beer. The surrounding neighborhoods existed because of that economy. 

Then it collapsed. From the 1930s, road haulage undercut rail.

Britain’s 1955 Modernization Plan – investing invested heavily in new marshalling yards - came too late. The yards became costly white elephants.

By 1961, freight was deeply unprofitable.

In 1963, Dr. Evil, I mean Dr Richard Beeching’sreport The Reshaping of British Railways, and subsequent cuts closed thousands of stations, and its subsequent cuts closed thousands of stations, ending the local goods yard economy, and incidentally stranding many small communities across the nation left without functioning rail lines and stations.

Beeching didn't just cut the passenger lines, he also ended the local station goods yard economy, transferring general freight to road services and consolidating what remained into containerized bulk haulage. Goods yards were abandoned and warehouses emptied. Simultaneously British industries that had generated the freight those yards handled were collapsing - coal, steel, shipbuilding, textiles. Everywhere, the result was the same - vast tracts of contaminated fenced off brownfield land sitting immediately behind surviving mainland stations such as King's Cross, slowly being colonized by weeds and pigeons, and eventually by people with nowhere better to go.

The M1 opened in 1959. Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan noted in 1963 that Britain had gone from two million to six million motor cars in a decade.

Fast forward 60 years, with congestion and climate pressures rising, planners have reversed course, focusing development around transport hubs.

It's also telling that traditional big box retail and department store shopping patterns have been radically altered by online shopping. Planners are challenged with finding new uses for city centre buildings and land in general. Stations such as King's Cross have become the global benchmark for this idea of transportation hub development. The place that defined what a post-industrial, post-car, station-centered neighborhood could be. The place that went from the worst example to the best.

By the 1980s, King’s Cross had cheap rents, poor lighting, and little oversight. It became London’s center for street prostitution, with open drug dealing.

It was also, if you knew where to look, a place of genuine creative energy.In 1982, Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy, and Jem Finer founded a band here, Pogue Mahone, later the Pogues - blending punk and Irish folk, emerging from the area’s pub scene.

That same year, the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied a local church for twelve days, protesting policing and racism—an early moment in the sex workers’ rights movement, reflecting how overlooked communities built their own world here.

The area’s reality was captured in films like Mona Lisa, and music like the Pet Shop Boys’ King’s Cross. By 1991, Sir Allan Green, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the country's chief criminal prosecutor resigned after being spotted kerb-crawling in King's Cross.

Everyone knew what King’s Cross had become. Nobody’s attention was on fixing it. Until…

On 18 November 1987, during the evening rush, a lit match dropped onto a wooden escalator at King’s Cross Underground. Beneath it lay decades of grease and debris. The fire seemed minor - until the escalator’s incline created what investigators later called the trench effect, accelerating flames into a sudden flashover, igniting the entire ticket hall.

Thirty-one people died. Over a hundred were injured. Among them was firefighter Colin Townsley, who died helping a passenger and was later awarded the George Medal.

The subsequent public inquiry led to sweeping changes: a network wide smoking ban, replacement of wooden escalators, and resignations at the top. Its key finding—those on the ground were not to blame.

The fire didn’t fix King’s Cross, but it forced the city to confront it - a district decaying in public view at the heart of London.

Early redevelopment plans stalled in the 1990s recession. The real turning point would come from Brussels with a decision on where a new international train service would terminate. This would finally unlock the forty acres of brownfield sitting in the middle of the city like a held breath.

ACT FOUR - THE KISS OF THE ROOF

Everything changed in 1996, when the Channel Tunnel Rail Link was re-routed to St Pancras from Waterloo. Restoring the station and building new infrastructure at King’s Cross triggered one of Europe’s largest urban regeneration projects.

The King's Cross Central Limited Partnership - formed in 2008 by developers Argent, London and Continental Railways, and DHL transformed the 67-acre site north of the two stations.

The developers deliberately included the local community in its process – its chief executive reportedly cycled around the area talking to 7,500 different people in over 350 separate meetings.

A different kind of community regeneration was happening 10 minutes walk away. In 2015, the freeholder of a small 1937 Backstreet pub on North Down Street put it on the market. The likeliest buyer was a coffee shop operator. The regulars refused. Fifteen of them pooled their money, raised £70,000, bought the 20-year lease, and became the owners.

King Charles I, 55-57 Northdown Street, N19BL. A pub. The building was put up by Watney Coom Reed, designed by Arthur Blomfeld, same year, same compact interwar layout as the French house in Soho, with its original curved bar counter and panel in on the camera national inventory for its interior of special historic interest, because almost nothing from that wave of 1930s brewery rebuilding survives intact in London. This does because the locals wouldn't let it go.

Community owned since 2015.  Listed as an Asset of Community Value, 2021. Five rotating hand pumps, free of tie, that means it's a freehold pub, live music most nights. Reportedly has the smallest men's toilets of any pub in London. Ladies, you're vindicated. Now the men have to queue. Elvis is barred.

So you mean reports of an Elvis sighted in that pub are not true? Well color me shocked. Despite some serious research, I can't find the reasons why Elvis is barred, and I'm assuming it's Elvis' music, not Elvis the man. Because as Kirsty MacColl told us,

"There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis".

In this massive regeneration project, twenty Victorian heritage buildings were restored. Fifty new buildings, ten new public spaces, and twenty new streets added. New apartments and a park sprang up inside converted Grade II Listed Victorian gasholders.

Granary Square - the great open public space with its celebrated dancing fountains in front of the old Granary Building — opened in 2012. Central Saint Martins had moved into the restored Granary Building the previous year, immediately seeding the area with young creative energy.

Google chose King's Cross for its UK headquarters. Meta, Universal Music, and Havas followed. Between 2010 and 2021, the number of firms in the area roughly doubled to 800. 

Jobs increased from 8,000 to 27,000. Office rents went from 48% *below* the London city-centre average in 2010 to 19% *above* it by 2022.

And then, in 2018, Thomas Heatherwick's Coal Drops Yard opened. The old coal storage buildings — two long Victorian brick viaducts that had spent the 1990s housing raves in varying states of structural decay — were connected by what Heatherwick called a, "Kissing Roof" - a dramatic curving steel structure that bows in the middle, joining the two buildings at the point where their rooflines meet, like the geometry of a kiss. The building now houses over fifty shops and restaurants. Some of the old rail tracks that once carried coal wagons from the station are still visible in the paving.

Above King’s Cross, the new western concourse - a vast steel-and-glass dome  designed by John McAslan + Partners and opened in March 2012. Built inside a 160-year-old Grade I listed station, on top of a live Underground ticket hall, without cancelling a single train.

Inside St Pancras, you’ll find our next pub, The Betjeman Arms, N1C 4QL. Upper concourse of St Pancras International, within the Grade I Listed St Pancras Station building. Named after the poet who saved the building. Original Midland Railway pillars, painted red. Its Grand Terrace overlooks the Eurostar platforms, while its Euston Terrace overlooks King’s Cross Station. The bronze Betjeman statue is ten feet from the door. A Young's pub, and a pleasant place to while away your time before boarding your train. Raise a glass in his direction.

Alternative - the Booking Office Bar 1869 inside the St. Pancras London Autograph Collection, NW1 2AR - the original 1860s ticket office, 29-foot bar counter, vaulted ceilings.

I started this episode with the claim that when I was younger, you got off the train and got out. The area around the station, not a place that you lingered. King's Cross proves that this no longer has to be true. And more to the point, it proves that it's worth making it not true, for reasons that go well beyond one neighborhood in one city. Because what happened here is not just a London story. It's the argument for a different way of building cities, one that's now being made in Newcastle, Cardiff, Edinburgh, every British town that still has an underused station surrounded by derelict land. The idea that the place with the best public transport connections should also be the most desirable place to live, eat, and work, that the train station should be the center of somewhere, not the edge of nowhere. King's Cross was the first draft of that argument written at a full scale, and the story of how a neighborhood went from beach in's dead railway lands to through decades of post-industrial neglect through a period that even The Pet Shop Boys thought was worth documenting as a symbol of something broken and out the other side into one of the great urban transformations of the last quarter century. Yay! This I think is generally one of the most interesting stories in contemporary British history. The area also has excellent pubs, which in this show is kind of the point.

So here's your walk.

Come out of King's Cross Station onto King's Boulevard and head in north. Walk past the fountains at Granary Square. Follow the canal tow path east towards the Coldrop's yard. Look up at Heatherwick's roof where the two buildings kiss. Walk back south past the German gymnasium. Go into St. Pancras, find the Betjeman statue, the man who saved the building you're standing in.

Then go to the pub and tell the person next to you what you've learned and where you learned it. Publicity, your London Travel Toolkit podcast. If they already knew all of this, buy them a drink. If they didn't, well, they owe you one.

I'm Expat Andy, and this has been Publicity, your London Travel Toolkit. Thank you for listening. Please share this episode with others you think might love it.

We'll be taking a hiatus of about a month or two while we work on logistics for upcoming season two. If you're a London local and want to be featured as a guest contributor in Season Two, email me expatandy@publicitypodcast.com