Sheffield to St.Germain
It's a good few years since I first took the to St.Pancras from Sheffield, and the station has come on a long way since. It used to be an unnecessarily cavernous and soulless station, with neglect smeared all over it. As you sat shivering on one of the few seats at the end of the platforms waiting for your train (or most likely stood), it was hard to imagine that in a few years time it would be the terminus of Britain's first high speed rail link, to Paris. But then I'm not an architect.Four years and £800 million of renovations later, the station is fabulous. There's been plenty written about it these last couple of weeks, and given that most of the column inches seemed lifted directly from press releases, it was interesting to see it from a the perspective of someone using it for its purpose, travelling from Sheffield to London to Paris and back. It is welcoming and vibrant, it uses the space well, the old and the new blend nicely and there are plenty of useful shops to stock up on supplies for your journey. What the press failed to mention though is that open it may be, but finished it isn't. There is plenty of building and fixing still to do and I imagine it will be a few months before you could consider it complete. The biggest issue at the moment is the departure lounge which is pretty poor. Basically it is a beer cellar, lacking natural light, and has far from enough seats for the number of passengers that use the station. As it stands, it has just a single coffee stand with an understandably huge queue. So if you are travelling on the Eurostar any time soon, my advise would be to check in at the last possible moment.
In the end though, it was a relatively minor annoyance. As the train left the station, and was within a minute diving into a tunnel and accelerating to 185 mph below the streets of London, the benefits over the old Waterloo International station were clear. Thirty minutes later we were under the English Channel, and 2 hours 15 minutes later, we were walking up the platform at Gare Du Nord considerably more relaxed than we'd have been had we flown.
Given the transport strike, we walked to our hotel in St.Germain. It was a lovely hotel in a great location. Oscar Wilde lived and died here and muttered his famous last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do...". We ate there too; the food was fantastic, the dining room cosy, and the service superb. If you fancy a decadent weekend in Paris I can't recommend the place highly enough.
Our time in Paris was spent just hanging out, walking around St.Germain and Ile de la Cité, eating and drinking. We can both live well without art galleries and have seen the city's sites before and so had little to do but relax and enjoy ourselves.
We did a lot of walking and as the train pulled back into St.Pancras station on Sunday evening were very glad that we could just walk to another platform in the same station to catch our train to Sheffield and look back on a fabulous weekend.
Pictures here
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