Inside the St Pancras Clock Tower: A Flat I Saw at Open House

The clock on St Pancras is one of the most familiar faces in London. On an Open House Saturday I went up inside it, and found someone's home.

Not a museum room with ropes. A real flat, with a piano, a sofa full of cushions, books up to the rafters and a table laid in a Gothic bay window. Someone lives here, every day, at the top of one of London's great Victorian landmarks.

Can You Actually Live in the St Pancras Clock Tower?

Yes. The St Pancras Clock Tower is part of St Pancras Chambers, the upper floors of the old Midland Grand Hotel on Euston Road. Those floors are private flats, and one of them runs up into the tower itself.

The hotel downstairs only uses the lower floors and a modern extension behind. From the second floor to the fifth, the original building is homes. There are 68 apartments, developed by the Manhattan Loft Corporation.

The clock tower flat is a duplex. According to the owners, it has two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, a galleried library and a study they call the Tardis. The master bedroom sits in the base of the tower.

It is a private home, and what I saw came from the day the owners opened their doors for Open House London. It's not a place you can walk into the rest of the year.

How Did a Railway Hotel End Up Full of Flats?

The Midland Railway built St Pancras as a statement. Sir George Gilbert Scott designed the hotel in front of the station, and its east wing opened on 5 May 1873. It was a railway terminus hotel on a scale London hadn't seen.

It didn't last as a hotel. The Midland Grand closed in 1935, and the building became railway offices under the name St Pancras Chambers. The grand rooms were partitioned, painted over and filled with desks.

By the 1960s it was under threat of demolition. It survived, and in 1967 the hotel and the station were both listed Grade I. That listing is why so much Victorian detail is still here to see.

The redevelopment split the building in two. The hotel reopened in 2011, with its famous grand staircase restored. The floors above became flats, and the clock tower became somebody's living room.

The hotel changed its name on 3 June 2025, from the St Pancras Renaissance to St. Pancras London, Autograph Collection. The flats upstairs are separate from the hotel and have kept the old name, St Pancras Chambers.

What Is the Painted Room Like?

The painted room is the grandest in the flat. The ceiling is a huge scalloped shape in cream, like a flower seen from below, framed in borders of red, gold and ochre.

There are painted stars and roundels in the corners, and a gilded rose in the centre where a light would hang. I don't know how much of the painting is Victorian and how much is later work, and I'd rather not guess.

At the far end, a deep bay window pushes out from the wall, all pointed arches and round tracery. The arch around it has been painted in a rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, in bands that follow the curve of the stone.

It's the most joyful thing in the whole building. Gilbert Scott's Gothic, and then somebody's cheerful rainbow laid right over the top of it. You can tell the people who live here love the place and don't take it too seriously.

Inside the bay there is a little wooden table with brass candlesticks and spindle-back chairs. The sun came in sideways through the tracery and drew stripes across the floorboards. I would eat every meal there if I lived here.

The rest of the room is lived in, not staged. A grand piano, a big patterned rug, armchairs, pictures leaning on the walls and a sofa buried in cushions. Somebody's real life, in the middle of a Grade I listed landmark.

What Is Inside the St Pancras Clock Tower Itself?

The tower room is the heart of the flat. The owners use it as their living room, and it rises about ten metres inside the spire. White walls, huge timber beams and a sense of standing inside the roof of a cathedral.

Halfway up the wall hangs a wooden box, like a wardrobe floating in the air. That's the original winding room for the mechanical clock. The clock itself is driven by a small electric motor now, but the box has stayed.

Below it, a gallery of bookshelves runs across the room, reached by a narrow spiral staircase. Hundreds of books, stacked right up under the beams. A library inside a clock tower. I can't think of a better place to keep books.

The tower is about 76 metres tall, and more than half of that height is usable space. Most of it was never meant for people, only for the clock, the weights and the wind.

The owners say the room was a dark storeroom for most of its life. Until 2008 the windows had wooden louvres, like a bell tower. They were replaced with slatted glass, marked so that from the street they still look like louvres.

The kitchen has a pair of stained glass windows salvaged from a 19th-century house in Lancashire. They show Aesop's fable of the fox and the stork. And according to the owners, wild peregrine falcons live in the spire above and keep the pigeons in check.

What Can You See From Up There?

The windows look straight across Euston Road at King's Cross station. From up here you see Lewis Cubitt's two great arched windows and his clock tower, with the square in front full of people and suitcases.

King's Cross is the older of the two stations. It opened in 1852, plain and practical, sixteen years before its flamboyant red neighbour. Seeing them side by side from above makes the contrast even sharper.

It's a funny feeling, looking down on a station clock from inside another station clock. Buses stacked up along the road, market stalls in the square, the whole of King's Cross going about its day with no idea anyone was watching.

The owners describe glancing views to St Paul's Cathedral, the Shard and the City of London from different windows. On a clear day the whole skyline opens out to the south and east. The tower is one of the places in my guide to the best views of London.

Lunchtime that same day was downstairs, in Booking Office 1869, the palm-filled old ticket hall. Going from there up to the tower is like moving from the public face of the building to its private attic.

How Can You Get Inside the St Pancras Clock Tower?

The only way I know of is Open House London, the festival that opens hundreds of buildings for free every September. The clock tower flat has taken part in some years, and the visits book up fast.

It isn't there every year. St Pancras Chambers and Clock Tower was listed for the 2026 festival and then withdrew. My Open House London 2026 guide covers what else was on.

Open House London is run by the architecture charity Open City. Most buildings are free drop-ins, but private homes like this one usually need a booked slot.

So if you want to see it, watch the Open House programme when it's published each summer. Search for St Pancras Chambers, and set an alarm for when booking opens.

Open House is how I've seen most of the interiors I love in London. The Law Society at 113 Chancery Lane and the Maughan Library were both Open House visits too, and both are Gothic in their own way.

If you are making a day of it, the British Library is next door on Euston Road and free to enter. Its reading rooms and treasures gallery are a calm way to come back down to earth.

Visiting the St Pancras Clock Tower: Practical Notes

📍 Where: St Pancras Chambers, above the St. Pancras London hotel on Euston Road, London NW1 2AR.

📅 Open days: A private home. Open only when the owners take part in Open House London, which runs each September.

🎫 Admission: Open House visits are free, but places are limited and have to be booked through the festival programme.

🚇 Getting there: King's Cross St Pancras, on the Victoria, Northern, Piccadilly, Metropolitan, Circle and Hammersmith & City lines.

☕ Food: Booking Office 1869 in the old ticket hall downstairs, open daily.

📷 Best time: A sunny afternoon, when light comes sideways through the bay window tracery.

🗺️ Nearby: The hotel's grand staircase, Booking Office 1869, the British Library and King's Cross.

Have you ever been inside the St Pancras Clock Tower, or is there another London tower you'd love to see from the inside?

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