King’s Cross Station, Euston Road, NW1

Constantly upstaged by St Pancras, its flashier, younger sister, King’s Cross Station, the London terminus of the Great North Eastern Railway serving Leeds, York and the Northeast, is 13 years older than St Pancras, and 14 years younger than Euston.

The influx of rootless young people, mainly from the North, trying to carve out a better life in the big city resulted in the proliferation of cheap hotels and burger joints, which in turn brought numerous social problems to the area. In recent years the name King’s Cross became synonymous with drugs and prostitution, though the abiding image of prostitutes hanging out on the girdered railway bridge in Mona Lisa was actually shot behind Liverpool Street Station.

Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) meets her old college friend Annie (Lynda Steadman) at King’s Cross in Mike Leigh’s Career Girls, but the station finally got its moment of cinematic glory in Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, housing the magical entrance to ‘Platform 9 3⁄4’, from which young Harry catches the Hogwarts Express.

Stardom, though, seems to have been undermined by sequel Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, which reveals the station exterior to be – inevitably – the more photogenic St Pancras.

The sign for ‘Platform 9 3⁄4’ and the shopping trolley passing through the wall are where they should be, between Platforms 9 and 10, for your photo op, but that’s not where the scenes were filmed. The magical entrance in the movie is the arched wall between Platforms 4 and 5.

Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone (2001, dir: Chris Columbus)
Career Girls (1997, dir: Mike Leigh)