Neon signs have a curious power

In a corner of St Pancras station, Tracey Emin is always turned on. ‘I want my time with you’, a neon sculpture by the artist, has been on show here since 2018. It was part of the ‘annual’ Terrace Wires public arts programme, in which a new work is commissioned every year to hang from the station’s roof; but the pandemic distended time, and Emin’s words have stayed put. Though a new commission was unveiled yesterday, an installation by Shezad Dawood, that hangs on different wires, elsewhere in the terminus.

Assembled from bright pink tubes, and shaped like Emin’s looping script, ‘I want my time with you’ looms over the grand Victorian concourse that sends the Eurostar to the continent. Think of it both as a lover’s declaration and the lament of the voters who wanted their country to Remain. That’s apt: neon was christened ‘new gas’ by the British scientists who discovered it in 1898, but today it trades on nostalgic joys. 

It can make you dream of the Jazz Age – the first neon sign appeared in Paris in 1912, and the form reached the States in 1923 – or the vulgar fun of the 1960s, when Vegas was on the up.