If I find myself becoming too complacent in my relative prosperity - looking with contempt, for example, at the posters in my area advertising the Muswell Hill Journal's "two-for-one bun offer" - then a trip to King's Cross puts me straight.
There are people around there for whom the unexpected appearance of an extra bun could make the difference between life and death. On the station concourse only this week, I saw a drunk painting nail varnish across the huge open sores on his legs, trying to create artificial scabs, I suppose.
King's Cross is just down the road from me now, but when I was a young man, arriving in London on the train from York, it was my gateway to the city - rather like gaining access to a funfair via the chamber of horrors. Here was an extra dimension to the class system such as could not be found in York. I mean the underclass: desperate individuals staggering about underneath that little model of a lighthouse at the top of Pentonville Road (which used to mark an oyster bar, but for decades has just looked like a sick joke), or slumped against the abandoned warehouses of York Way which seemed to me like great, blank-faced prisons.
I watched that great Ealing comedy of 1955, The Ladykillers, over and over. It showed King's Cross as a healthy, bustling place, capable, yes, of accommodating the eponymous band of desperadoes, but also their unwitting host Mrs Wilberforce, with her neatly rolled parasol, sunny disposition and pretty house very conveniently situated - if you were a murderer - on top of the Copenhagen Tunnel.
Maybe King's Cross will be like that again soon. There are big plans for the area, which will probably spell the end of the 50p cup of coffee (the big attraction in the cafes of the Cross at the moment) and will see the influx of a fair number of those people who talk mainly on their mobiles. But the developers have also undertaken - as all developers in London now must - to provide a large percentage of affordable, "social" housing.
Social diversity could be the key to success for King's Cross, just as it was for those wonderful Ealing comedies.
