WHEN I visit the new Camden borough library Pancras Road, I like to switch at leisure between past and present.
The visitors to the area, tourists and Londoners, say to me, 'Have you seen what they've done?'
But they praise, not criticize. The new Pancras Road library is near the new King's Cross station. Both are shimmering in newness and underlined by history.
To reach the new library, I leave the Underground at King's Cross and walk through the gleaming vastness of the new adjoining overground station. There, ahead, is the new library.
Geographical district and Library hint strongly at what used to be. King's Cross before the rebuilding was a tough but not rough area used for location filming in many a black-and-white British movie of the 1940s and 1950s. The Library, before it moved around several corners from within the now 'old' Town Hall was a place packed with low and highbrow books. A few chairs containing dozing locals were stationed at the end of aisles down which earnest students browsed. In the same old building as the library people were married at the registry office and they danced in the ballroom built just before World War Two broke out.
The new Library in Pancras Road is part of the also new Camden borough Civic Offices. To its advantage, on entering, you don't feel you are in a monolith of civic offices,and I suspect you are not mean to feel you are.The old Town Hall remains a walk away in its original position nearby, with its curious side-street entrance you might remember.The new Civic Offices face you with its many levels front-on. My personal impression is that of a smart, welcoming department store, a pleasure to explore, so that among its various seemingly floating levels you find what you want, slowly or quickly: a library, council departments, a cafe.
Whoever collects stories and impressions from the past might eventually store similar for the future.
King's Cross station and Pancras Road Library are ready to work the imaginations of generations to come.
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