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, Durham and up to Edinburgh and Aberdeen, Scotland, via the East Coast Mainline.

It is served by the London Underground station Kings Cross St. Pancras, which also serves the adjacent St. Pancras station. Euston and Kings Cross Thameslink stations are a few minutes walk away.

The new London terminus of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is due to be built in the area behind Kings 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.

The new British Library building is a short walk from Kings Cross station.

Although considerable regeneration effort (and money) has gone into the area over recent years, there is still a significant presence of drug dealers and prostitutes.

Kings Cross features in the Harry Potter books of J. K. Rowling, as the location from which the Hogwarts Express train departs although the location used in the film version is actually Marylebone Station. There is a cast iron sign on a wall of the secondary building that houses platforms 9-11 that proclaims entrance to 'Platform 9 3/4'.

History

Kings Cross was originally designed and built as the London hub of the Great Northern Railway and terminus of the East Coast Mainline. It was designed by Lewis Cubitt, and constructed in two years, 1851-1852, on the site of a former fever and smallpox hospital. It was opened on October 14, 1852. Since privatisation, express services into the station have been run by Great North Eastern Railway or GNER. According to legend it is built either on the site of Boudicca's final battle, or that her body is buried under one of the platforms there.

The original "Kings Cross" was a monument to King George IV.

A note about the apostrophe:

• Kings Cross is the name for the surrounding area, as supported by both style guides and general usage. Reference: [1]
• Google searches also say that Kings Cross station is more common than King's Cross station
• King's Cross is the "official" signage on both the railway and tube stations; it is also used on the London Underground maps...
• but Kings Cross is the "official" usage in the timetable database, as well as being used on other "official" railway pages: joyously, the official station page at [1] uses both styles.

See also

• Charing Cross
• Euston
• Fenchurch Street
• Liverpool Street
• London Bridge
• Marylebone
• Paddington
• St Pancras
• Victoria
• Waterloo

• British railway system
• UK topics

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There is also a Kings Cross train station in Sydney, Australia. The train station is on a part of the suburban rail network that runs underground. It is neither very big nor particularly well-known, but the area is well-known (some say "notorious") as the location of Sydney's red-light district.