Reading on Trains Number 48: Some Small Trains, Part 2.

Copenhagen Fields

The Model Railway Club, founded in 1910, is the model railway club, the oldest in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records. Readers are probably expecting me to say that it’s appealing for new members or that the bank is foreclosing on it, but the club is thriving, with a healthy youth sector. Its premises, off the Pentonville Road, extend over three floors, and the main room has a big test circuit with a dozen track gauges.

Thursday evenings are the bustling ‘club nights’ but I was last there on a Thursday afternoon when things were, I must admit, pleasantly sleepy. With the flimsy curtains closed against the rainy dark of a winter’s afternoon, this could have been a church hall in any English village, except for the rumble of Tube trains passing below. I was a guest of John Scott-Morgan, the railway author discussed in my last post, and I found him and another member scrutinising a delicate model of Stephenson’s Rocket which, with its vertical cylinders and long pistons, slightly resembled a grasshopper. I myself had turned up with a Hornby tank engine, bought for me from a charity shop by my wife, still boxed and apparently brand new. It had cost two pounds – a bargain, if it worked. (We will be returning to that engine.)

A scene of pure escapism, then – a disavowal of the MRC’s gritty King’s Cross location? Perhaps, but back in 1983, the MRC embarked on the creation of a layout called Copenhagen Fields that celebrated King’s Cross, albeit the King’s Cross of the 1930s. The layout is still not quite finished but, as the MRC booklet about it states, it ‘fits very snugly into a Luton headed 35cwt Transit van’ and regularly tours the country starring at model railway exhibitions. It’s named after a pleasure garden beneath which, in 1850, the Great Northern Railway rudely excavated Copenhagen Tunnel, heralding the end of bucolic leisure in the vicinity of ‘the Cross’.

When assembled, the layout is a massive diorama twenty-two foot long, and even though it’s in 2mm scale (by which standard gauge track is not quite a centimetre wide) there’s no room for King’s Cross station itself. The scene depicted – bounded by York Way to the west and Caledonian Road to the east – begins at the goods sheds south of the station. It includes the first tunnel out of the station – Gasworks Tunnel – as well as Copenhagen Tunnel. Beyond the latter, the scene encompasses two Leslie Green Tube station surface buildings: that of York Road (which is what York Way used to be called), which survives like a haunted house although trains stopped calling there in 1932, and that of still extant Caledonian Road.

Mrs Wiberforce’s house.

The layout also includes Frederica Street, where eccentric, indomitable Mrs Wilberforce lives in The Ladykillers, in a house backing onto the sooty turrets of Copenhagen Tunnel – and we are now about to break the space time continuum, or something like that. The Ladykillers was released in 1955, and it shows the King’s Cross of that time, although Mrs Wilberforce, being elderly and quaint, dresses like an Edwardian. Her house is subsiding ‘because of the bombing’, as she explains, with typical nonchalance, to Professor Marcus, whose villainy is signified (albeit not to unworldly Mrs Wilberforce) by his enormous teeth. The house, propped up to compensate for the subsidence, features on the MRC layout, even though it never actually existed except as a mock-up for the film and, if it had existed in the 1930s, it would not yet have been bombed, so wouldn’t have needed to be propped up. The house is deliberately anomalous in the film and on the layout: a detached, suburban-looking property with gable windows at the end of a street of austere three-storey terraces more characteristic of the Cross at the time.

The Laing showhouse outside King’s Cross. John Maltby/RIBA Collections

It’s as incongruous as the showhouse erected by the building firm, Laing, on the forecourt of King’s Cross in the 1930s, to show off the kinds of property that might be available beyond ‘the Smoke’ (a term with a very literal meaning in King’s Cross back then). The forecourt of King’s Cross has been a mess for much of the station’s life. In the interwar years, there were coffee stalls, lit by Naphtha flares for late night transients. From 1972 until 2005, there was the horrible prefab ticket office, where I used to buy tickets to York, my native city and comfort zone, when I’d run out of money in London. If I had any money left after the ticket purchase, I’d have a pint and a pickled egg while awaiting my train in a pub on York Way. That pub was possibly the one that’s now called The Fellow, where, instead of a pickled egg, you can have a kimchi and mature cheddar croque monsieur with pickled fennel and watercress salad.

It's time to acknowledge that the re-developed King’s Cross is much better than all its previous incarnations, as I often reflect when buying a can of chilled Pinot Grigio in Waitrose, on the site of the old goods yard, before drinking it at one of the tables generously set out beneath some fairy-lit trees on Granary Square, while watching all the cool people come and go.

Throughout the Nineties I used to look at architects’ depictions of how, in some ideal future, the abandoned coal drops on the railway lands – from which coal from Durham and Yorkshire was distributed by road all over London – might be re-invented as boutique retail. Well, those dreams all came true.

The MRC would never have modelled the area as it was in the 1970s and Eighties. The 2mm scale kit is not widely available commercially; you build it yourself, and it would have been depressing to model Victorian buildings with smashed windows and graffiti daubs, with figurines of sex workers, heroin addicts, muggers and their victims standing (or toppled over) nearby.

Much of the area had been horrible in a different way in late Victorian times, when Belle Isle developed east of York Way. Belle Isle was ironically named, because it was a centre of noxious trades, usually related to dead animals: condemned meat processors, fat boilers, gut scrapers, grease-makers. Today, the district is a creative hub, where among many other technological facilities, uncontaminated spaces for electronic manufacturing called ‘cleanrooms’ are available.

Belle Isle was signified by an Italianate tower bearing, in black letters on white, the word ‘Ebonite’. I think it had originally belonged to a maker of rubber mallets. It lasted until 1983 and I just about remember it. It features on the MRC model, having lasted from 1870 to 1983. The modern Belle Isle incorporates a road currently lacking a street sign but that is, or was, called Vale Royal, another ironic name that succeeded an even more ironic one for the same thoroughfare: Pleasant Grove. If you walk east from York Way along this, you come to a car park, and from here you can see the top of Copenhagen Tunnel, the supposed site of Mrs Wilberforce’s back garden. About twenty years ago, a man used to keep shire horses there.

Frederica Street of the 1950s was largely demolished a decade later to make way for the social housing that characterised King’s Cross until the luxury high-rises came along. An early example of it is located about fifty yards from King’s Cross in the form of the Stanley Building, a late Victorian block of flats where the heroin of my novel, The Martian Girl (a trainee mind-reader), lives with her father.

All in all, you can see why the Model Railway Club went for a 1930s scene: Belle Isle had matured into a district of respectable small factories by then, and of course there were still lots of trains, some very glamorous, thanks to LNER publicity. I suppose, the MRC might have plumped for the 1950s, the Ladykillers era, but then they would have had to show the distressing bomb damage.

But even if they were to start building Copenhagen Fields all over again, they wouldn’t set it in the salubrious modern day. Not enough trains, and no self-respecting railway modeller wants to be building the Google HQ in 1:152 scale. The other day, when I was walking past the succession of infinity pools in front of that building, I saw a woman stop someone to ask, ‘Excuse me, where’s the railway station?’

Now back to that model loco of mine.