Kings Cross station is a railway station in Kings Cross in north central London, United Kingdom. It serves routes to the North East of the country, including Cambridge, York and Durham.
It is adjacent to St. Pancras station.
The London Underground underground station for both, Kings Cross St. Pancras, has platforms on the Victoria, Piccadilly, Northern, Circle, Hammersmith & City, and Metropolitan lines. It was the scene of the devastating Kings Cross fire on November 18, 1987 which killed thirty-one people.
With Euston and Kings Cross Thameslink stations only a few minutes walk away, this area is a major transport interchange of north London. The new London terminus of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is due to be built in the area behind King's Cross and St Pancras stations. Eurostar trains are due to arrive there in 2007, in the second phase of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link project.
Kings Cross features in the Harry Potter books of J. K. Rowling, as the location from which the Hogwarts Express train departs.
History
Kings Cross was originally designed and built as the London hub of the Great Northern Railway, now Great North Eastern Railway or GNER. It was designed by Lewis Cubitt, and constructed in two years, 1851-1852, on the site of a former fever and smallpox hospital.
There is also a Kings Cross train station in Sydney, Australia. The train station is not particularly well-known, but the area is notorious as the location of Sydney's red-light district.
A note about spelling:
- Kings Cross is the name for the surrounding area, as supported by both style guides and general usage.
- Google searches also say that Kings Cross station is more common that King's Cross station
- King's Cross is the "official" signage for the stations
- but Kings Cross is the "official" usage in the timetable database, as well as being used on other "official" raliway pages: joyously, the official station page at [1] uses both usages