Travel Reference
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yard. Meanwhile, before quitting Euston, London adventurers should sample Eversholt
Street which runs alongside the station up to Mornington Crescent and Sickertian Lon-
don. There are interesting early nineteenth-century terraced houses, grey with railway dirt.
On the edge of the Polygon are many barbers (a lathering of barbers, to coin a collective
noun), small mixed businesses, and cafés. One of my favourite Gothic Revival churches
is here, half-way down the street where the original Euston platforms curve away behind
a wall. St Mary the Virgin is cut-price work of 1824. It was designed by the Inwoods who
built several churches in St Pancras, notably the parish church in the neo-Grecian style. St
Mary's is worth a visit: it is the kind of tea-garden Gothic that aroused Pugin to a frenzy,
and is, I think, the best example of cardboard medievalism in London. I like it in the same
way that I like bad paintings. After the war, I discovered some 'Gothic' patterned wall-
papers in bombed-out houses in this part of London, papers contemporaneous with the
church and the product of a similar outlook, absurd but disarming.
