I haven't been to Folkestone since the 1980s when I took a ferry from there to go on a press trip to France with BMW (and I can't remember much about it at all.
I bought a rail ticket in Peterborough for London to Folkestone and went to St Pancras next door to King's Cross to catch the train. St Pancras station is completely transformed since it became the Eurostar hub; it's more like a shopping mall than a station and because I had half an hour to spare, I had a good look around. King's Cross is being renovated at the moment (it has been for the last five years, it seems) but it will be nothing like St Pancras when it's finished, it will still be a practical station - a place to get trains, not to go shopping.
In any event, I do St Pancras a mis-service because, at the end of the shopping mall, there are some platforms, including trains to Kent on the new high-speed link. This uses the trains pictured below. Built by Hitachi, they come in four units and look pretty businesslike. The train was packed coming into London at 9am, but there was only a handful of people going out. Inside, they are superb, much better than the commuter trains I use each day.
From St Pancras to the first stop at Stratford International is only 10 minutes or so and most of it is either through tunnels or deep cuttings, so there's not much of a view of Hackney or the Lea Valley. For a high-speed train, it doesn't feel very fast, but once you get past Stratford to Ebbsfleet and then Ashford, it really does pick up speed (about 140mph). You go under the river and for a while you're running alongside the M2 (I think) towards Dover, overhauling cars in the fast lane like they're in a different medium.
I have to say, it's massively impressive as a train journey, but Stratford, Ebbsfleet and Ashford stations are truly monstrous buildings - half underground and with awful concrete walls, they are universally grey. It's almost as if someone has tried to make them as ugly as possible. I felt quite sad that we have this superb train stopping at such ugly places. I think if I was a visitor going to the Olympics next year, I might just turn around and go home when I got to Stratford. Why have they made them so awful?
Folkestone station is nicer - a proper old-fashioned station, but one that's had some thoughtless modernisation and years of neglect. It looks as if they've started to renovate it, but run out of money. Why do we let our infrastructure get into such a mess? Folkestone is a typical seaside town; it's seen better days and modern roads have sliced it into disparate parts, but it still has some fine buildings and some grandeur. A lot of these places seem to have got lost in a bit of a timewarp. Considering it's so close to London, some aspects are a million miles away. I was early for the meeting, so I popped into a cafe for a coffee and asked for a skinny Americano. The waitress looked at me as if I was talking a different language and even after explaining what I wanted, she still gave me a latte!
After my meeting, which was in Tontine Street (see footnote) I headed back to the station.
I'd just missed the fast train (by 10 minutes) so took the train to Charing Cross (just coming in) thinking it can't be much slower. Actually, it was a very comfy train (again much better than my commuter trains), but it stopped everywhere, picked up another four coaches in Ashford and then cut across Kent to Tonbridge and Sevenoaks and tiny places I'd never heard of. It took over an hour an a half to get into London and then I hopped off at London Bridge (Charing Cross was another two stops), but what was striking was how lovely the old stations en route were. They were as different to Stratford and Ebbsfleet as an ugly 1970s shopping centre is to an old high street. Better kept, quaint, pleasing to the eye, they looked as if they had been designed to make travelling a pleasure and not an exercise in herding livestock.
Footnote: now 'tontine' isn't a word I've heard in 50 years. I heard my Aunt Pam in Barnton talking about having to go to pay her tontine. It's a form of group insurance/saving scheme which people might have used to pay funeral costs or the like. I guess modern insurance policies have all but done away with them.
