These days the most conspicuous presence on the gritty streets of King’s Cross is not call girls and crack dealers but buttercup-yellow huddles of hard hats. Through the clouds of cement dust you can just about make out signs explaining that the hat-wearers are ‘considerate constructors’, motto: ‘Improving the image of construction’. This attempt at what psychiatrists like to call ‘impression-management’ has echoes in the project on which the men are engaged — to liberate the area from its sordid past and transform it from a place where people don’t linger if they can help it into somewhere they choose to settle.
The industrial age turned semi-rural King’s Cross into a tangle of squalid slums presided over by the imposing twin presence of Gothic-revival St Pancras and King’s Cross, its more balanced and functional neighbour. Many were driven from their homes to make way for the stations, and the area became a place for goods, not people.
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