Many travelers opt for Eurostar for its sheer convenience. With a headline travel time of just 2hrs 16mins from the heart of London to the middle of Paris, Eurostar will invariably be the fastest option. Others favor the international rail service for its reasonable fares. Book when tickets first go on sale (four months before travel on the London to Paris route), and you’ll surely catch a bargain.

From edgy and unloved landscapes…

But there is quite another reason why canny travelers bound for Paris are so inclined to hop on Eurostar. This journey has a remarkable cinematic quality. Climb aboard, settle down in a comfortable window seat and just watch.

The departure from St Pancras is a gentle piece of theatre. Then tunnels and light interact, with screenshots of edgy and unloved landscapes in Essex and north Kent. Cut from a scene of the old automobile plant at Dagenham to a late Saxon stone church stranded on the Essex marshes.

… to the garden of England

The train zips under the Thames then over the Medway, suddenly entering a green and pleasant land, a more rural England than we have seen in the first part of our journey. The railway plays cat and mouse with the Downs, here and there diving through tunnels under chalk hills.

Along the way, there are gorgeous scenes of Kentish orchards and pasture land. This is pure therapy.

Flanders fields

On, under the English Channel, and you’ll be in France within an hour of leaving London. Here the landscape has a more expansive demeanor.

Cassel, a magnificently-situated hill town in the distance, is a reminder that Flanders is not totally two-dimensional. Dashing south from Lille, the line cuts through territory defined by its rivers. We bridge the Scarpe and the Somme. This is a journey that evokes memories of too many wars. But it captures too the blessings of peace.

Arriving in Paris

Two hours out of London and we are into the final act. Paris suburbs are pushing north into fields where not so long ago sugar beet was grown.

We surf the city, making tracks for the Gare du Nord. But watch carefully, for just before arriving at the terminal, the River Seine has a minor walk-on role. You’ll catch a glimpse of it on the right as the train cruises south through St Denis.

Just over two hours of pure cinema. And like all good movies, it’s one worth watching time and time again.

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Wider horizons

Four years ago this week, St Pancras found new life as London’s gateway to the continent, when Eurostar services (which until then served Waterloo on the south bank of the Thames) relocated to St Pancras. The spectacularly refurbished Victorian train shed was transformed by the arrival of Eurostar, which runs frequent trains to St Pancras from Brussels, Paris, Lille and Calais, occasional trains from Marne-la-Vallée and seasonal services from the French Alps and the Rhône Valley.

Since 2009, sleek new Javelin high-speed services (run by Southeastern) have revolutionized links between the capital and east Kent, running from St Pancras to the Medway Towns, Dover, Canterbury and the Thanet Coast – along the way making use of High Speed 1, the new fast rail line that runs from St Pancras to the Kent Coast and Channel Tunnel.

A spot to savor

Lingering at St Pancras last week, we saw how frazzled clock-watching commuters hurried through the station and tourists rushed to reach the Eurostar check-in gate before the nominal cut-off time.

Yet St Pancras deserves much more. This is more than a mere railway station. It is a palace, a spot that exudes an exuberant sense of place, so much so that it demands a certain reverence. It is a place for lingering departures and happy arrivals, a theater full of meeters and greeters, and a place just to enjoy.

St Pancras Renaissance Hotel reopens

St Pancras is a star among stations, made even better this year by the long-awaited reopening of the station’s celebrated hotel. The St Pancras Renaissance is a feast of Victorian Gothic splendor, the perfect place to splash out for a stylish first or last night in London when arriving or leaving with Eurostar. Choose your room carefully, and you may even get an engaging view of the interior of William Barlow’s spectacular train shed where the Eurostar trains come graciously to a halt as they arrive from the continent.

The perfect beds for train spotters, of course. But the sheer convenience of the St Pancras Renaissance makes the hotel a hit with regular travelers who want a quick getaway. Such convenience does not come cheap, of course, but you can chance a flavor of the hotel by checking out its bars and restaurants. Where once Londoners queued to buy tickets to all points north, there is now The Booking Office, an elegant bar and bistro which serves such English staples as fish and chips or bangers and mash, as well as more up-market fare. If you want to splash out, the hotel’s Gilbert Scott restaurant, all elegant curves and bright red banquettes, is a spot for fine dining.

The interiors of the hotel are heavy with nostalgia (as indeed is the airy main departure concourse of the station). The hotel epitomizes all that is superb about St Pancras: it is finely balanced and richly ambiguous, cherishing the legacy of the past while looking to the future.

Too good to rush through, St Pancras deserves to be a destination in its own right.

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Whether you’re traveling by boat, train, or rail, the eager anticipation at arriving to a new destination in Europe often makes us miss the best bit of the entire journey—the moment of arrival.

Arriving by boat

Some of Europe’s finest arrivals are by sea. There may be no great drama in arriving in Iceland on the Smyril Line ship Norröna from Denmark. Instead, there is the sheer beauty of the lonely eastern fjords and the knowledge that this is how the first settlers arrived on the island over a thousand years ago.

And Venice is really at her best arriving on a summer morning after a long ferry journey up the Adriatic. Last time we took the Minoan Lines ferry from Corfu, it crept into Venice at about eight in the morning, the giant ship dwarfing the buildings on the famous Venetian skyline. Never did San Marco look so good.

Approaching London by train

Arrivals by train offer their own peculiar theater. London has not just one but two of the very best in Europe. The last half hour of Eurostar’s run into London from the Channel Tunnel is rich in dramatic aesthetics.

The railway skirts Kentish hop fields, dives under the North Downs, crosses the Medway on a spectacular viaduct, before a tantalizing series of tunnels bring the railway back above ground for a graceful, seemingly endless, curve into London’s St Pancras station – now handsomely restored to reclaim its status as easily the most elegant of London’s railroad termini.

Speeding into Paddington

If there is a rival to the  Eurostar run into London, it is the fifteen-minute hop on the Heathrow Express from London’s principal airport into Paddington station.

The run out of Heathrow is unremarkable, and gives no hint of what is to come. But free of the airport tunnel, the 12 mile journey on Brunel’s Great Western route into Paddington is a fabulous feast for the senses. The train storms past Victorian water towers and canals. There are art deco factories, a magnificent Sikh temple, eerie wastelands, and the back gardens of endless terraces of small houses. All of English life is laid bare for the traveler arriving in London.

True, the Heathrow Express costs a little more than the tube, but it is worth the premium fare. Few other such short journeys by train are so richly entertaining. And speed brings its own benefits. Last time we used Heathrow Express, we were enjoying a beer in our hotel room at Lancaster Gate less than half an hour after boarding the train at Heathrow.

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