Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my daily independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling, whether you're dreaming of a great escape, looking forward to one or actually away, and I hope having the time of your life.

Today, I am at St. Pancras International, not just the most beautiful station in Britain,

in Europe, in the world, but also the hub for our most important, in fact only international

rail link. I will be talking about Eurostar. Of course, this podcast is completely free, as is my weekly travel email,

and you can sign up for that in a trice by going to independent.com.uk forward slash newsletters.

Well, St. Pancras International is the most gorgeous station. If you've not been here, well, let me tell you that I'm actually down on the lower level in one of the many coffee and tea locations and burger joints, there's pubs, it's just gorgeous. It is, and forgive the phrase, which I coined, it is a desty station station, so wonderful, and forgive the phrase which I coined, it is a destiny station,

uh, station so wonderful and so full of joy and beauty and interest that it is a destination in its own right.

And it's gone from being a kind of really clapped out old terminal which was in danger of being

completely destroyed in the 70s and 80s.

It was just one end of the East Midlands line which was from here up to wellford to Sheffield, to Derby and so on.

And while it was pretty important in the first half of the 20th century, it wasn't at all

important after that.

And now, thankfully, it has been brought back to life.

And thanks to the fantastic Thameslink trains which run through the station underground

it is actually the best connected station in the whole of the UK you can get to Brighton from here you can get to various parts of Kent

you can get to many stations on the Midland main line and crucially you can also

get to Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels on Eurostar. However, while Eurostar always struck me really for the first

yeah, I'd say the first 25 years of its life as being sort of

slightly lucky in the sense that it had no real competition between london and paris

London and brussels quite a lot actually between London and Amsterdam.

Now it's in a right old mess and that's because, well, the government has decided to

impose the most draconian restrictions that any European country has got

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