The glorious St Pancras Renaissance, in London

Not many buildings get the chance to be feted on two separate occasions with such fanfare. When the Midland Grand Hotel - a Gothic fantasy dreamt up by architect George Gilbert Scott - opened at St Pancras station in 1873 the applause could be heard over much of the British Empire. \'Nothing in fact or fiction can match this wonder, it would be the envy of any medieval king,\' said Arthur Conan Doyle. Now, 138 years later, it has opened again as the St Pancras Renaissance and the swooning has been just as enthusiastic. Some £150 million has rescued this wonderfully over-the-top Victorian confection, and all those who thought it should have been demolished in the Sixties should hang their heads in shame. Or check in for a night, spend a small fortune and beg forgiveness. This is a triumph of spectacular proportions, one that makes the patriotic heart beat faster. Conversely, you feel you\'ve left the country altogether when, in fact, you are just off the Euston Road. One minute you\'re in Paris, the next you\'re in one of Milan\'s exquisite shopping galleries. A hotel shouldn\'t make you dream; it should be the dream. But it nearly didn\'t happen at all for us. I was a few seconds from giving up on the place altogether after being shunted off to Marriott\'s \'central reservations\' in America, from where a woman told me that if I had specific questions about the rooms I should call the hotel. Which I did, and was handed back to America and then back to London again. Hopeless. We explained all this to a delightful Frenchman on reception who said: \'I know, it is a crazy situation. We keep telling the reservations people to come and see the hotel for themselves.\' He said we could either look out on the British Library or the Eurostar Concourse. Concourse, please! And for once it didn\'t matter matter that we were hermetically sealed behind reinforced glass or that the room was a touch small or that there was the faintest whiff of boiled cabbage. We were just above the inspired statue of Sir John Betjeman, the former Poet Laureate who led the campaign to save St Pancras in the Sixties. \'Look up,\' was his advice to Londoners. Fittingly, he\'s looking up at William Barlow\'s astonishing glass-and-steel, single-span train shed, the evening sun bouncing off the roofs of the shiny high-speed trains. Tourists stop and stare. The Gare du Nord is not a patch on this. The booking office is now a bar and restaurant but it\'s like walking into the anteroom of a cathedral. We ordered a couple of drinks and some nuts, which knocked us back £24.98. But we were so dazzled by everything that we skipped along to the Gilbert Scott restaurant on the top floor - run by Marcus Wareing - offering polished English nosh in another ecclesiastical setting, albeit one with far too many pews. Service is accomplished and the ceiling is so high that conversation remains on the menu - unlike the slinky bar next door, where the acoustics are atrocious. After dinner, we took a stroll around the concourse, past Europe\'s longest champagne bar, past Searcy\'s oyster bar, past the statue of the kissing couple, past the Betjeman pub. We had a superb breakfast in the Booking Office. Some of our fellow buffet grazers were on their way to the Continent, others had just arrived. The cappuccinos were sprinkled with excitement. If I were the Olympics president, I\'d hold court here. It\'s a gold medal winner and we can all feel mighty proud of it.