A 4.2 restaurant and bar named RAILS, in the great railway lands of King’s Cross and St Pancras
RAILS Restaurant and Little Bar holds a 4.2 from eight hundred and eighteen people, and carries a name that salutes, plainly and directly, the thing that defines its entire location: the rails, the railway, the tracks that made King’s Cross what it is.
The rails
There could hardly be a more fitting name for a venue in this particular spot. King’s Cross and St Pancras are, above all else, railway places – two of the great termini of London, the point from which the East Coast Main Line and the Midland Railway drove north, and now the gateway to the continent via the Eurostar. Everything here is shaped by the rails: the stations, the hotels, the old parcel yards and ticket offices we have already visited, the whole geography of the district.
To name a restaurant simply “RAILS” is to plant it firmly in this identity – to say, this is a railway place, and we embrace it. The rails are the tracks, the lines, the steel roads that carried the trains and built the district. The name is direct, industrial, and honest, evoking the romance and the machinery of the railway in a single plain word.
The Great Northern context
RAILS is associated with the Great Northern Hotel – the beautiful curved Victorian railway hotel beside King’s Cross that we met, under its initials, back in the Bloomsbury survey as GNH. This was one of the first purpose-built railway hotels in the world, and its graceful crescent, restored as part of the King’s Cross regeneration, is one of the loveliest buildings in the area.
A restaurant called RAILS, in and around this pioneering railway hotel, is doubly appropriate – it sits in a building created by and for the railway, in a district defined by the railway, saluting the rails in its very name. The whole thing is coherent: railway hotel, railway district, railway name.
The romance and the reality of the rails
The rails carry a genuine double meaning, and a good one. On one hand, there is the romance – the railway as adventure, as departure, as the great Victorian achievement that shrank the country and connected the nation, all steam and speed and distant destinations. On the other, there is the sheer industrial reality – the steel, the engineering, the unglamorous machinery of moving people and goods.
The name RAILS, plain and strong, captures both: the poetry of the journey and the hard steel that makes it possible. The Prat’s railway desk approves of a name that neither over-romanticises nor apologises, but simply names the essential thing – the rails – that this whole extraordinary district was built upon.
The Little Bar
The “Little Bar” in the name is a nice touch of honesty and charm – not a grand bar, not an epic bar, just a little one, a small and intimate spot for a drink alongside the restaurant. It is the same appealing candour we admired at Downstairs at Sucre and the Cosy Cocktail Bar – a venue happy to describe itself plainly and modestly rather than reaching for false grandeur.
The restaurant
A 4.2 across eight hundred and eighteen people is a solid, real-sample score. The reviews describe good food and a pleasant room, doing an honest trade in the heart of the railway lands.
Verdict
A solid restaurant and little bar named RAILS, saluting with plain honesty the railway that defines its entire district, in and around one of the first purpose-built railway hotels in the world.
Go, have a meal and a drink in the little bar, and raise a glass to the rails themselves – the steel roads that built King’s Cross, carried the nation north, and gave this honest, well-named venue its home.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
In British comedy, the prat is the character who makes us laugh because they remind us of ourselves at our most foolish.
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