It is an autumnal Tuesday night and I am sitting alone at the Champagne bar on the top floor of St Pancras Station, as the Eurostar hisses in and out of the platform behind me. The tragi-glamorous tableau is complemented by the other patrons: men resembling Michel Barnier and women drinking alone, expressionless and in demure navy. Quick, someone play “Ode to Joy”.
“No longer an island” the Guardian declared on the 2007 opening of the Eurostar platform. This feat of Anglo-French sub-aquatic engineering was supposed to link us all in the spirit of pan-European bonhomie. Paris closer to the heart of London, London back into the soul of Parisians. If Belgians had an inner life, this train would help us understand them too. Citizen of nowhere? Try citizen of everywhere.
Brexit might have crippled the spirit of the Great British Europhile but they can find solace in this concourse: EU bureaucrats with their embossed Tumi briefcases, ambiguous omni-accents and Schengen evangelism float past on their way back to the continent. I glance to a couple (married, but certainly not to each other) who are sharing a St Pancras-branded magnum of Champagne – not even the wine labels have any sense of autochthony. You are safe here with me, Gina Miller.
I investigate the menu: cheeseburgers, Caesar salad, ricotta and lemon ravioli, hot dogs, prawn cocktail, fish and chips, French onion soup, arancini. This is dinner from everywhere. Dominic Cummings may have taken back control over Britain’s fisheries and corporate regulatory practices, but he has no purview over St Pancras, where the borders are porous and the nation state an anachronism. The received wisdom that menus tend to benefit from a cohering identity would come as a perverse ethnonationalist shock to the proprietors of Brasserie de Deracination.
It’s not just the Eurostar, of course. Democratised travel was supposed to bring us closer together – EasyJet, Ryanair, Interrail. But all I detect up here, at the epicentre of the ageing Euro-travel renaissance, is a train station dragging marriages farther apart. I spot another affair: a middle-aged pair with temporarily discarded wedding rings and small weekend bags. I think their train departs at 8pm; it has just pulled in to the station. This scene feels transposed straight from the brain of Sofia Coppola – with all this listlessness and yearning, I half expected to see Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson sitting opposite. That you can get married here – at this altar of Francophone infidelity – must be some sort of sick joke, delivered straight from François Mitterrand’s grave.
There is a certain romance to transience, of course. Though I didn’t find much of it in my dinner: green salad (limp, unseasoned, unhappily warm), chips (deep fried most of the way to eternity – where the next train might take me, God willing), Sauvignon Blanc (so non-descript it might be Sprite). The stool is too low or the bar too high to eat comfortably. I am condemned to eavesdrop on all the loneliness one can only experience in a Victorian crypt with Paris just two hours away. The station provides more than just a backdrop for the wistful melancholia – I suspect it is its source, as I witness travellers hasten their marital obsolescence.
As shorthand for modern alienation, this one is so on the nose that it verges on amusing: transnational bureaucrats and infidelitous chancers, united by their shared obligations to no one in a cathedral of bad salads and wheelie suitcases. At the end of the concourse a giant pink fluorescent sign, suspended from the ceiling, spells out “I want my time with you.” Tracey Emin, the progenitor of this ghastly visual intrusion, suggested in 2018 that really it was a “subliminal message” to the rest of Europe, mid Brexit. I want my time with you – Paris, Lille, Brussels, Strasbourg, paramours and all. Just not my wife!
On my way home from work a few days later, I pass a Carluccio’s closing up for the night. No one normal has ever conducted an affair in a Carluccio’s, I thought. But no one has ever been happy in one either. At least St Pancras makes rootless, cosmopolitan transience feel like a noble quest.
[Further reading: Can this curry make Britain less depressed?]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 08 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The truth about small boats