New lights for old

The St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel has been carefully restored after decades of neglect. But this meant the lighting designers had to perform a delicate balancing act, says Nick Martindale

For decades the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras stood empty, an abandoned relic of a bygone age of opulence. Now, though, after years of painstaking restoration, the grade-one listed building has finally been returned to something approaching its former glory.

The Marriott-run hotel, now known as the St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel, opened its doors in March 2011 – although the top four floors house luxury apartments.

The entire project has been a labour of love – and an expensive gamble for the developer – but the lighting has been pivotal to the resurrection of the hotel. At times, the designers seemed to be treading what must have seemed an impossibly thin line between creating the right ambiance and remaining loyal to the desire of the architects and the client – not to mention English Heritage – to recapture the atmosphere of the 1870s.

Martin Valentine, former lighting group director at Aecom and now lighting expert to the municipality of Abu Dhabi, had worked on the building previously as part of a protection project in the mid-1990s. He had also worked on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, another Sir George Gilbert Scott building. That experience was pivotal to Aecom’s successful bid for the Midland Grand Hotel contract in June 2006, and Valentine went on to oversee the design and installation of much of the lighting over the next four years.

A broad remit

The remit for St Pancras was broad. Aecom handled the lighting for the bars, the spa, conference suites, function rooms, club lounge, VIP suite and hotel rooms, as well as lighting in the apartments and on both the external façade and roof terrace.

The two biggest challenges, however, were the grand staircase that was typical of Scott’s original gothic design, and the converted taxi rank that now makes up the hotel entrance, reception room and ballroom. Here, there were severe restrictions on changes to the walls or ceilings. The former taxi rank space, in particular, required some innovative thinking.

“Most lighting in these spaces is from positions in the wood floor using bespoke floor outlets that supply freestanding and table lamps, as well as large freestanding furniture pieces housing various fixtures,” says Valentine. “We worked with the structural engineers on the listed Victorian skylight roof to establish a maximum load and won approval for fixing positions to the beams, letting us hang large pendants with additional spotlights to push up the illumination levels when needed.”

Grand staircase

The grand staircase, meanwhile, now uses a combination of balustrade fixtures, multi-arm wall fixtures and suspended bowl fixtures over landings, reconstructed from original pictures of how the hotel appeared in its Victorian heyday.

“In most cases these also house hidden, non-maintained emergency LED units to meet standards for escape illumination,” says Valentine. “The only invasive measures we had to make were to double the number of wall positions, so we have now two locations for every half-circular set of stairs and smaller versions between windows on the top landing.”

Throughout the historic spaces in the hotel, new and bespoke lanterns were fitted based on the original gas light fittings that had later been converted – by twisting the arms through 180 degrees and installing Edison light bulbs – into electrical lights.

“I took the decision to recreate the lanterns early on because the listed ceiling rose positions were quite far apart and lanterns allowed me the platform to hide extra kit that would help compensate for the distance,” says Valentine.

“With the photographs we were able to get a good idea of the lantern dimensions and draw up a bespoke design that housed, in addition to the candle-lamp holders, a hidden 3W emergency LED optic inside the central stem and miniature halogen spotlights on the tray top to pick out the ceiling and alleviate some of the glare and contrast.”

Out with the old

David Turner Workshop was commissioned to build the new lanterns – with three different models used throughout – as well other fine fixtures using components bought in from Precision Lighting, Etap and a custom Voltmaster stabilising transformer from Multiload.

The urge to over-light the hotel was something Valentine and the two architecture firms involved with the project – RHWL and Richard Griffiths Architects – were determined to resist. “We tried to convey to the client and design team the mood that it was necessary to achieve,” says Valentine. “I used a number of methods for this, including using stills from films such as The Third Man and Citizen Kane, images of various parts of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and hand-drawn sketches, all of which tuned down people’s expectations and reliance on computer visuals, lux levels and modern interior lighting approaches.”

John Simpson, director at RHWL Architects, believes the lighting plays a central role in the overall ambiance of the building. “It was desperately important for a building like that,” he says. “There were lots of areas that were very badly lit in terms of the natural lighting and even the artificial lighting that has gone in still struggles a bit. There were major restrictions from our side and from English Heritage, because the ceilings were sacrosanct.”

Going outside

Outside, the approach was more minimalist, says Valentine, with the main vertical elements of the structure subtly highlighted to give the façade depth. “I made a conscious decision that less is more,” he says. “Part of the attraction of St Pancras is the vast Gothic silhouette. For the first time in around 50 years this will have the addition of internally-lit windows, most of which are ornate Gothic arches, to add to this effect. I felt that to over-light the façade would have been a big mistake.” No doubt Scott would agree.

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