King's Cross Walk

This is a guided walk of contrasts; from the old to the right now. King’s Cross is an area which is still a work in progress.

We meet at Euston before embarking on a 90 minute tour exploring the dramatic past of the area including an iconic hotel, grand stations and a delightful London terrace. We also see why the building of the railways rather than improving the poorer areas, in reality made them even worse.

This walk has at its heart the expansion and transformation of London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. King’s Cross used to be the village of Battle Bridge, at the centre of a large sparsely populated parish. 

The area was changed out of all recognition by roads and railways. The construction of the New Road (known to us as Euston Road) in the 1750s led to prestigious ribbon development which then became decidedly less upmarket with the development of three of London’s greatest railway stations in the following century.

The area to the north of the New Road was always one of the capital’s most deprived, and when the railway companies built their lines, stations and goods yards they claimed they were engaged in slum clearance.