St Pancras Station, London. Photograph: David Sillitoe
St Pancras Station, says London & Continental Railways - which will soon start running 300kph Eurostars from under the station's great engineering Gothic iron-and-glass train shed to Paris, Brussels and beyond - is to be twinned with New York's Grand Central, from where Cary Grant boarded the legendary C20th Limited for a ride to Chicago in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and where throngs of commuters head out and back each day up the Hudson Valley towards Buffalo, Connecticut and New Jersey.
It's a nice idea: a kind of Lonely Hearts Club, or dating service, for buildings. Certainly, Victorian Gothic St Pancras and Beaux-Arts Classical Grand Central are an odd, if very grand, couple indeed. What they have in common, though, is wonderfully romantic architecture and heroically functional plans. Both are true transports of delight. And both were nearly demolished, wilfully, by their owners in the 1960s. John Betjeman helped lead the campaign to save St Pancras, while Jackie Onassis lent her name and svelte glamour to the saving of Grand Central. Now, Betj and Jackie O . . . there's an even odder couple, brought together, in a way, through a love of fine architecture and a sense of what the public will care about if only it is consulted.
There are buildings that have always been somehow twinned in the popular imagination. St Pancras station itself with King's Cross. The two Liverpool cathedrals, the Gothic Revival one for the Church of England designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, and ultra-modern, Roman Catholic "Paddy's Wigwam" by Sir Frederick Gibberd, sited at opposite ends of Hope Street. This is a wonderful pairing; how well they set one another off. The Pantheon and the Parthenon are somehow paired because their names sound the same, and because they represent the highpoints of ancient Roman and Greek architecture.
The Empire State Building and Chrysler Building have always looked like a very sexy couple; so much so, that the fashionable Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, once represented them in bed together in a bizarre post-coital scene. This is going a bit far, and yet, I think there's a very good reason for twinning buildings that takes us back to the stories of Grand Central and St Pancras; the plight, and architectural importance, of one can draw attention to the other, and to both in times of real strife.
If only New York's glorious Pennsylvania Station - the design of its concourse based on that of the Baths of Caracalla - had been twinned with old Euston Station in London, perhaps love letters between the two buildings (and between those who tried to save them) would have drawn enough media and popular attention to their joint plight, and saved them both from barbaric destruction. If they had been seen at the time to have been killed off together, then their demolition would have been the stuff of a kind of architectural Pyramus and Thisbe or Romeo and Juliet.
I hear, though, on the iron grapevine, that Gare du Nord is more than a little upset about this love-in between Grand Central - brash American hussy - and St Pancras - who is no longer an English gent, however upright, prickly and Victorian, in her opinion.
