Massage treatment at the St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel

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By Daniel Scott

It is 1873 and in the sparkling new steam kitchen, deep in the bowels of the Midland Grand Hotel, a banquet is being prepared. Her majesty Queen Victoria is about to unveil the hotel above St Pancras Station and an army of chefs is busily chopping, stuffing and stirring the feast with which many dignitaries will celebrate.

As I doze on a broad, warmed table I dream that I am the banquet's centrepiece, a roast goose, and that I'm being basted with warm oil and kneaded in readiness for the oven.

"Daniel," says the chef, just as I'm about to be shoved into a two-hundred degree inferno. "Daniel," repeats the kind face of massage therapist Nadia, from Kent, "it's time to turn over", returning me instantly from my time-travelling adventure.

It's nearly 240 years later when I fully wake up but having a luxurious massage in the historic steam kitchen of the newly re-opened St Pancras Hotel makes you prone to this kind of fantasy. The restoration of this grandiloquent Victorian property has been so lovingly done that it's lost none of the lustre of the original design by Sir George Scott but has added many luxurious modern touches such as this beautifully-cocooned subterranean spa.

Located alongside an indoor swimming pool, a gym, steam room and a sauna in the hotel basement are ten swish treatment rooms. The whole spa area has a warm, inviting feel which is something of a miracle given the rumble of traffic on Euston Road above, the fact that adjacent St Pancras station is crowded with passengers headed for Paris on Eurostar and that all the hotel's public areas are abuzz with London's trendy young things.

Back from being a goose I enjoy Nadia's strong, confident massage and have days of jet-lag and travel weariness eased from my body. At the St Pancras spa, treatments feel almost ritualistic, although there's no faux tinkling of Buddhist bells or suchlike to accompany them, and mine leaves me thoroughly soothed. At the end of ninety minutes I am ready to take on all the excitements of staying in central London in one of its iconic hotels.

It's funny though, stepping back out into the "real" world of the St Pancras Hotel I never really recover from my massage-induced Victorian dream. Walking up its broad staircases, through its lofty corridors and into the giant atrium-like lobby, it's hard not to be transported back to the golden era of train travel that heralded the hotel's original opening.

Spa Files

Voted the Number One Hotel in the UK in The Sunday Times Magazine's 2011 Top 100 Hotels in the World.
Address: St. Pancras Renaissance London Hotel, Euston Road,· London, England NW1 2AR.
Phone: +44 20 7841 3540.

Website: www.marriott.co.uk/hotels/travel/lonpr-st-pancras