St.

Pancras Renaissance London Hotel

St. Pancras Renaissance London Hotel (est. 2011) is a hotel in London, England, adjacent to St Pancras railway station. It opened in March 2011 occupying parts of the former Midland Grand Hotel (1873-1935), including the main public rooms, together with a new bedroom wing on the western side of the Barlow train-shed. The upper levels of the original building have been redeveloped as apartments by the Manhattan Loft Corporation. Midland Grand Hotel In 1865 the Midland Railway Company held a competition for the design of a 150-bed hotel to be constructed next to its railway station, St Pancras, still under construction at the time. Eleven designs were submitted, including one by George Gilbert Scott, which at 300 rooms was much bigger and costlier than the original specifications. However the company liked it and construction began. The east wing opened in 1873 and the rest followed in Spring 1876. The hotel was upscale and expensive with costly fixtures including a grand staircase, rooms with gold leaf walls and a fireplace in every room. The building had many innovative features such as hydraulic lifts, concrete floors, revolving doors and a fireproof floor construction, though as was the convention of the time none of the guest rooms had bathrooms. The hotel was taken over by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway in 1922, before closing in 1935, by which time its utilities were outdated and too costly to maintain, such as the armies of servants needed to carry chamber pots, tubs, bowls and spittoons.The building was renamed St Pancras Chambers and used as offices for British Rail. In the 1980s it failed fire safety regulations and was shut down. The exterior was restored and made structurally sound at a cost of around 10 million in the 1990s.

Planning permission was granted in 2004 for the building to be redeveloped into a new hotel. The St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel opened on 21 March 2011 to guests; however, the formal Grand Opening was on the 5th May - exactly 138 years after its original opening in 1873.