Exclusive photos: Where Thomas Heatherwick will transform King’s Cross

Question: What do you do with a sprawling abandoned goods yard located slap bang in the centre of London, featuring a collection of very large, Grade II listed but crumbling industrial buildings?

Back in the 90s, the answer was to turn the place into a huge nightlife hub, complete with its own annual festival, attracting thousands of weekend hedonists to party hard in intimate arches or at vast, multi-room raves.

Before that, it was slightly less sexy: haulage firm lock-ups, golf driving ranges and fading blacksmith workshops, and previous to that were many years of stables and industrial warehousing for the likes of glass merchants Bagley’s of Knottingley, from which the main nightclub space eventually took its name.

But now, the Coal Drops – which were originally built in 1850 as a way of dropping train-loads of the black stuff from elevated railway lines directly into storage and horse-drawn road transport below – are to undergo their biggest rebirth yet.

Permission has just been granted for the latest piece of the modern-day King’s Cross regeneration jigsaw: and it’s a huge new retail destination.

As the first images of the design, created by Heatherwick Studio, (behind the Routemaster busses and the 2012 Olympic Calderon among many high profile global projects), hints, it’s another ambitious placemaking project for London N1C.

The key feature is a roof that rears up to join the Eastern and Western Coal Drops buildings, creating a new upper level while also cleverly managing to incorporate the precarious remains of the northern section that went up in flames back in 1985 (currently visible if you sit at the tables outside Dishoom).

Despite the much-praised sympathy for the Victorian structures that continues to mark the regeneration of Goods Yard and the nearby Gasholders, there have inevitably been a few voices of concern.

They worry either that Heatherwick’s sweeping rooftops badly distort the original buildings, or that bringing shopping to area will turn it into little more than the next Covent Garden, but with even less soul.

Having toured the site last year to snap these amazing photos of the former dancefloors at Bagley’s nightclub, I’d say both those fears seem unfounded.

The history of these troubled structures was already in doubt just ten years after they were built, when in 1860, the Great Northern Railway were stripped of the right to manage the Coal Drops after dreadful customer service and illegal coal trading. A few years later the adjacent Plimsoll Viaduct was completed and offered a much better way of dropping coal – one that didn’t damage it as it cascaded from wagon to hopper below.

In fact, never has these building’s future been so secure. Much as I personally lament the loss of them playing home to some of central London’s most legendary rave spaces for nearly two decades, regeneration of King’s Cross has been on the cards since the end of the second World War, and it’s fairly amazing that the Coal Drops have survived the Luftwaffe and crazy urban planning schemes to this point.

Our hard hat tour revealed just how vast and quirky the derelict spaces here are, so it is going to take a bold and fiercely creative project to make it all work. This ain’t gonna be no Westfield.

The swanky boutiques that will set up shop here in 2018 might not preserve quite the same edgy post-industrial badlands vibe as the gritty, bass-heavy madness of the TDK Cross Central Festival days, but the Heatherwick scheme is almost certainly the best outcome for these exciting, historic structures.

Having sat silent since the last tune was played back in early 2008, it will be fantastic to have public access to these buildings a decade later, scrubbed up and preserved.

Rumour has it there might even be a music venue incorporated as a nod to the area’s clubbing heritage. Perhaps there’ll even be a blue plaque or two?