page_title: London King's Cross railway station
section_title: Restoration
hierarchical_section_title: London King's Cross railway station / History / Restoration
caption_attribution_description: English: The western departures concourse of London King's Cross railway station. The image was taken with a 30mm lens; f6.3; 1/80 s; ISO 400 and is composed of 36 landscape shots in four rows stitched together using Hugin and blended with Smartblend and Photoshop. The photo was taken from a central position on the mezzanine floor during the evening rush hour.
context_page_description: King's Cross railway station, also known as London King's Cross, is a passenger railway terminus in the London Borough of Camden, on the edge of Central London. It is in the London station group, one of the busiest stations in the United Kingdom and the southern terminus of the East Coast Main Line to North East England and Scotland. Adjacent to King's Cross station is St Pancras International, the London terminus for Eurostar services to continental Europe. Beneath both main line stations is King's Cross St Pancras tube station on the London Underground; combined they form one of the country's largest transport hubs.
  The station was opened in Kings Cross in 1852 by the Great Northern Railway on the northern edge of Central London to accommodate the East Coast Main Line. It quickly grew to cater for suburban lines and was expanded several times in the 19th century. It came under the ownership of the London and North Eastern Railway as part of the Big Four grouping in 1923, who introduced famous services such as the Flying Scotsman and locomotives such as Mallard.
context_section_description: The £500 million restoration plan announced by Network Rail in 2005 was approved by Camden London Borough Council in 2007. It involved restoring and reglazing the original arched train shed roof and removing the 1972 extension at the front of the station and replacing it with an open-air plaza.
  The new semi-circular departures concourse opened to the public in March 2012. Situated to the west of the station behind the Great Northern Hotel, it was designed by John McAslan and built by Vinci. It caters for much-increased passenger flows and provides greater integration between the intercity, suburban and underground sections of the station. The architect claimed that the roof is the longest single-span station structure in Europe and the semi-circular structure has a radius of 59 yards (54 m) and more than 2,000 triangular roof panels, half of which are glass.
  Land between and behind Kings Cross and St Pancras stations is being redeveloped as King's Cross Central with around 2,000 new homes, 5,000,000 sq ft (464,500 m²) of offices and new roads. In the restoration, refurbished offices have opened on the east side of the station to replace ones lost on the west side, and a new platform, numbered 0, opened underneath them on 20 May 2010. Diesel trains cannot normally use this platform for environmental reasons. The restoration project was awarded a European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Award in 2013.
  In May 2016, the Office of Rail Regulation approved a new operator, East Coast Trains, to operate services to Edinburgh Waverley via Stevenage, Newcastle and Morpeth. The service is expected to start in 2021.
caption: King's Cross following refurbishment in 2012. The steel structure of the roof, engineered by Arup, has been described as being "like some kind of reverse waterfall, a white steel grid that swoops up from the ground and cascades over your head".[60]
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