And there, paying no mind to any of it, are the hundreds of bodies jostling against one another as they get to wherever it is they’re going. But they should! For Euston Road is in fact the most generous of thoroughfares.
It’s the site of the longest Champagne bar in Europe, five Pret-a-Mangers and a phenomenal E.R. that I recommend to anyone considering breaking a bone. On one end is an unpopular underpass, where someone has left belongings tucked into a polluted corridor of cars for safety. On the other, taxis disgorge well-heeled visitors on the doorstep of the retro Standard Hotel. Opposite is the fat and welcoming British Library, composed of 10 million bricks, a number that merely nips at the toes of the 60-million-brick St. Pancras Hotel next door. Best of all are the caryatids of the St. Pancras New Church, four toga-wearing terra-cotta ladies who bear part of the roof, austerely holding the gaze of passengers on the top level of the No. 30 bus.
When I pass Euston Station, London’s midcentury commuter-hell answer to Penn Station, I sometimes think about how, in 2021, activists protesting a new high-speed train line burrowed tunnels beneath it. I read in a news article at the time that one of them was called Jimbino Vegan, a name that dogged my thoughts until I remembered that a barefoot busker in a park handed me a flier with that same name on it in the weeks before the dig. Or I think about one night when the street was thronged with carousing Scots, some in kilts, most of them singing, who came to London for a soccer match. I loved the idea that these men took the train all the way down from Scotland to King’s Cross and decided that the constellation of cruddy pubs a few meters away from the station was a reasonable place to end their journey.
Dumb reminiscences like these speak to the way our lives puddle into the architecture of a city; the way we sketch buildings and paving stones and traffic intersections with our memories, the way places become ours when we compile little facts and stories about them. The house that used to be over there, a person you once saw and can’t forget. I want to say there’s nowhere like Euston Road (I feel confident that in no other city has the site of something called the Great Dust Heap been replaced by an ancient, unmarked stone and a betting shop with tinted windows). But all cities have streets that vibrate similarly with life and mess and history. Euston and the dirty, busy, lived-in streets like it are marvelous because they’re where our experience of a place collides with what’s already there. Isn’t that why we live in cities in the first place? To feel our existence rubbing against everyone else’s?
At least that’s how I feel now whenever I return to London. I shuttle from an overstuffed plane to an overstuffed rush-hour Tube from Heathrow, and when I get off, dog tired, at King’s Cross, it isn’t to space or calm or anything remotely people-free. I walk on to Euston Road, I take in the cranes, the cabs, the Ladbrokes, the high arches set in the honeyed stone of the station and that weathered, inscrutable stone across the road, and I know that I’m home.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com