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Time to bring Boudicca down from her lofty perch
• KING’S Cross, it seems, is to be usurped by St Pancras as London’s favourite meeting point. Hardly likely. King’s Cross has always had a particular ambience, an aura of intrigue that invites dalliances, skullduggery, liaisons and cloak-and-dagger rendezvous.
I suppose this is very much in character with that wildly profligate libertine, George IV, after whom it was named.
He was renowned more for his gluttony than his debauchery. His corporeal excesses have been embodied in statuary and portraiture showing his ample girth. One such statue is reputed to have been erected in King’s Cross on his death in 1830 but dismantled a decade later. The whereabouts of it is now anybody’s guess.
If the area in front of the station is to be turned into a public square, then a statue of this great patron of the arts, a giant in his own right, should stand at its centre, corpulent and licentious though he may have been.
And let’s spare a thought for the statue of Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni, lonely as a cloud on one of the lofty pinnacles of nearby St Pancras.
You’ll have to crane your neck and squint your eyes to get so much as a glimpse of her.
Surely, she would welcome a return to terra firma – something which the people behind the renaissance of St Pancras are unlikely to agree to, this magnificent station having now been lumbered with a colossus in the likeness of the sculptor Paul Day and his partner Catherine.
The statue is somewhat of an anachronism in the Victorian setting of the station.
Walter Roberts
Henfield Close, N19
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