Dent Clock, St Pancras Station

The massive clock hanging at the south end of the St Pancras trainshed is a successor to a Victorian original that nearly vanished from history. When British Rail attempted to remove the massive slate-dial clock in the nineteen sixties, it was accidentally dropped and shattered into thousands of pieces. A railway guard named Roland Hoggard purchased the wreckage for twenty-five pounds, loaded it into his guard's van, and transported the fragments to his farm in Nottinghamshire. He spent years painstakingly reassembling the shattered dial on the side of his barn, where it stood exposed to the elements for decades. When the station underwent its massive restoration in the early two thousands, engineers returned to those salvaged fragments to create a faithful replica that now graces the modern terminus.