The niches had been designed to hold statues, but the Midland Railway had baulked at the extra expense, so they had remained empty. Here, at the hotel which prefaced the station, Venetian High Gothic met the beginnings of the Aesthetic Movement, the whole edifice looking down on the surrounding area as if in command of it.Bryant rested himself, remembering how King’s Cross, Euston and Somers Town had looked when he was a child. He vaguely recalled a Christmas party held at Reggiori’s restaurant, a genteelly shabby dining hall with a chipped fountain of turquoise porcelain standing at its centre. A neon amusement arcade now stood upon the site. Further back had been the fragments of Regency terraces that had miraculously survived the wartime bombings; the Rising Sun boxers’ pub; the German eating rooms where they sang ‘Lili Marlene’ as they served boiled sausage; the great gasometers. The peculiar old lighthouse that stood on the roof of the building in the centre of the road had supposedly been built to advertise a long-vanished fish shop.
