meish dot org: life, unfolding

There are these signs up on hoardings around the back end of Kings Cross, (where our new offices are), which say pithy things about the area -

King’s Cross is being delivered
King’s Cross is convenient urban living
King’s Cross is 4.9 million sq ft of office space

and so on.

The thing is, as ever, there’s more to the area than that.

True, there’s an enormous amount of development going on in the neighbourhood, and in a couple of years it’ll be a major hub of arts, public space, transport and working (or so we are told).

But for the moment, (and for me) at least, King’s Cross is:

1. Still a bit seedy, actually, especially when you find yourself walking down a back street in the dark, plus there’s a lot of boarded up shops and things
2. A constant negotiation of route-to-work-optimisations being shut down (there’s so much building work going on that they keep closing entrances from the tube and the station, which means every few weeks the route needs to change)
3. Lacking in decent lunch options
4. Easy to get away from (except when they throttle the tube entrances at rush-hour, which happens, um, every night)
5. The location of the first UK Blogmeet (in June 2000, at the Lincoln Lounge, fact fans)
6. Walkable to loads of places (like Islington, Coram Fields, Clerkenwell, Bloomsbury)
7. Thronged with arriving befuddled tourists wearing sandals and dragging gigantic cases and getting in the way…and departing stag/hen weekenders in matching cowboy hats, perched on weekend wheely cases, staring tiredly at the departures board
8. The departure point for trains to places I used to live (Leeds, Edinburgh) and where I have connections (Glasgow, York, Newcastle). Every day, cutting through the station on the way to work, the temptation to hop onto an idling train and be whisked off up to Scotland or the north is rather huge. So far, I have resisted.
9. Littered with cranes and man in hi-viz jackets/hard hats
10. Where I first kissed my husband (before we were married, obviously), in a terrible pub on the station concourse, nine years ago this weekend, with terrible helmet hair, after rushing across North London on a motorbike to meet him off a train so we could swap compilation mini-discs we’d made for each other.