King's Cross Conservation Advisory Committee

King's Cross Conservation Area Advisory Committee is the Conservation Area Advisory Committee for the King's Cross Conservation Area in the London Borough of Camden.

Origins

The committee was first formed in the late 1980s to respond to the increasing development pressures on the King's Cross Conservation Area.

Membership

It is made up of volunteers who have an interest in conservation and development issues of King's Cross.Members may belong to other different groups, such as the Labour Party, the Greater London Industrial Arachaeology Society or the Camden Civic Society. However, no person belongs simply because the are in the membership of another organisation, and everyone is expected to work together to pool their talents to develop a policy for KXCAAC.

Origins

The immediate first cause which lead to the formation of the KXCAAC was the destruction of the potato sheds, an existing structure in King's Cross Goods Yard, at that date just outside the King's Cross Conservation Area boundary.

King's Cross was under pressure. Within a couple of years there was a proposal that the Channel Tunnel Railway (the high speed link to London from the Channel Tunnel) be placed in a trench crossing the site, which would carry the London station for the line.

In a typical trade-off, the site, which consisted of the King's Cross Goods Yard, the area south of the Regent's Canal, and the disused area of land to the north - sometimes called the Railwaylands, should be redeveloped as a commercial centre.

Norman Foster was the lead architect or master-planner for this development. His plan called for the creation of a park at the south of the site, with commercial building surrounding it and concentrated to the north. It called for the destruction of many of the historic industrial buildings, including: The Midland Goods Shed, the Eastern and Western Coal Drops and the greater portion of the Transit Sheds which lay outside the conservation area.

The plan failed because of a downturn in the property market in the early 1990s and the failure of Parliament to agree a route through north east Kent by which the Channel Tunnel Railway could reach London.

The second plan

The failure of the first plan did not relieve the need for a new high-speed line into London. Trains would arrive at the French coast from Brussels or Paris at 300kph, and after crossing through the Channel Tunnel to England had to use the traditional "boat train" routes BTR1 and BTR2 to reach London. These were heavily used commuter lines, and even finding train paths for the new traffic was hard.

The second plan approached St Pancras station from the east. Trains on the Paris and Brussels services would terminate there.

This was a huge change in St. Pancras's fortunes, which as late as the 1960s had been scheduled for demolition.

[The masterplan for King's Cross http://www.argentkingscross.com/masterplan.html]