i went for a walk around the new, or new old, St Pancras today. It is, as everyone else has said, a very impressive place. But stuck at one end, greeting every visitor and returning native as they get off the train, is this stunningly bad monument to kitsch.
you can kind of see how they got there. They wanted to celebrate the romance of train stations, which house so many emotionally charged meetings. A really talented sculptor (say, Gormley, who admittedly would probably have erected a statue of himself) might have taken that brief and created something that none of us would have thought of but all of us recognised as meaningful. But they gave it to a hack, asked for something 'iconic' (can someone take that particular cliché outside and shoot it?), and ended up with something that looks like it was ordered from the pages of a Sunday supplement.
people who work in advertising agencies talk about the 'account man's ad': that is, the ad that meets the brief in a literal sense but which embodies no creative flair or imagination whatsoever. The account man's ad is not meant to actually get made - it's a starter for ten for the creative team to better. This one got made.