St Pancras Renaissance Hotel: The Grand Staircase Guide
Updated: Sep 28
Between King's Cross Station and the British Library sits the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. A Gothic Revival pile that opened in 1873 as the Midland Grand Hotel, closed in 1935, stood empty and condemned for decades, and reopened in 2011 after a £200 million restoration. It is best known today for one thing, and it is not the bedrooms. It is the Grand Staircase.
Since 3 June 2025 the hotel has traded as St. Pancras London, Autograph Collection, still a Marriott property. Most people, and most searches, still call it the Renaissance, so that is the name I use here.
What the St Pancras Grand Staircase Actually Looks Like
Sir George Gilbert Scott designed it as the centrepiece of the Midland Grand in 1873, and the detail is relentless. The steps are marble. The balustrade is cast iron, painted a dark colour and finished with a gilded handrail that runs the whole way up. The walls are stencilled in deep red.
The light is worth paying attention to, because most descriptions get it wrong. It does not come from a skylight. It comes in sideways, through tall Gothic lancet windows set into the stairwell wall. Which is why the staircase is bright on one flank and dim on the other and why it photographs so well in the late afternoon. Look up instead and you get the part almost everybody misses: a ribbed, vaulted ceiling, painted, high above the top flight.
The ironwork and plasterwork were restored during the redevelopment that began in 2004 and finished in 2011. The hotel that grew back around the staircase has 245 rooms, Booking Office 1869 in the station's former ticket hall, and the Hansom Lounge under the old carriage driveway. All of it is handsome. None of it is why anyone arrives holding a camera.
Can You Visit the Grand Staircase If You're Not Staying?
Partly – and less freely than most guides to this staircase imply, which is worth knowing before you make a trip of it.
The lobby, the bars and the restaurants are open to anybody who walks in off Euston Road, so you can see the foot of the staircase without spending a penny. And rather more of it if you sit down for a drink.
The staircase itself and the floors it leads to are for hotel guests. Staff are asked about this constantly and are polite about it. People are sometimes waved up, but that is a favour rather than a right, and turning up with a tripod at eight in the morning is the reliable way to be told no.
If you want the whole thing, with time and no one waiting for you to finish, book a room. Everything above the ground floor opens up when you are holding a key.
What Was Actually Filmed on the St Pancras Staircase
The staircase was named one of the "25 Most Beautiful Staircases in the World" by Condé Nast Traveler in 2018, and it has been earning its keep on film for far longer than that:
The Spice Girls' "Wannabe" (1996). The one everybody remembers. Shot in the entrance and on the main staircase, in a single take, after the band were refused permission to film in Barcelona. The building was derelict at the time.
The Secret Garden (1993). The staircase stood in for Misselthwaite Manor, which is the closest it has come to playing a house rather than a hotel.
Richard III (1995). Ian McKellen's fascist-Britain version used the building as King Edward's palace.
Batman Begins (2005). The Arkham Asylum stairwell was filmed here, which tells you how much menace the place can carry when it is lit for it.
And the Harry Potter Bit, Which Nearly Everyone Gets Wrong
Search for this staircase and you will be told, repeatedly, that it played the Hogwarts staircase in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. It did not.
St Pancras is in the film. Its Gothic front is the "King's Cross" that Harry and Ron fly the Ford Anglia away from, because the producers thought the real King's Cross next door looked too plain for it. That is an exterior. The Hogwarts moving-staircase sequences were built and shot elsewhere, and nobody ran up this one to the Gryffindor common room. London does this a lot – Cecil Court gets the same treatment as "the real Diagon Alley", on evidence that is just as thin.
The staircase is remarkable enough without borrowing a credit it never earned.
If You Liked This One
London has a small circuit of Victorian and Edwardian interiors that reward the same kind of looking, and several of them ask less of you than this one does.
Above the hotel, the upper floors of the old Midland Grand are private flats, and one of them runs right up into the clock tower. I got inside on an Open House Saturday, and wrote about the flat in the St Pancras Clock Tower.
Over on Chancery Lane, the Maughan Library is Gothic Revival of the same vintage and lets you walk straight in. The Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith is the Art Deco answer to it. And once a year Open House throws open a hundred buildings that are normally shut, including the Argentine Ambassador's Residence on Belgrave Square. Whose own staircase is the best thing in the building and the thing everyone walks past.
📍 Where: St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, Euston Rd, London NW1 2AR.
🚇 Getting there: The nearest London Underground stations are King's Cross St Pancras, on the Circle, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly, and Victoria lines.
🎫 Admission: Free to walk into the lobby, the bars and the restaurants. The staircase and the floors above it are for hotel guests.
🗺️ Nearby: The British Library is next door, and its Treasures gallery is free to see. Booking Office 1869 is inside the hotel, in the old ticket hall. Granary Square, behind King's Cross, hosts the Classic Car Boot Sale a few weekends a year.
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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.
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