GLOBETROTTING
LONDON
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
•
FEBRUARY 2013
•
ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER OUMANSKI
19
ROYDEN STOCK IS
a substantial
man. With his black suit and stubble
of gray hair, he looks like someone
who can handle himself—and he has
spent most of his professional life
trading on the fact that he can. Yet
here he is, standing below a frescoed
ceiling, musing over Edmund
Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene
.
As resident historian at London’s
St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel, Stock
makes it his job to know about such
things. Situated in George Gilbert
Scott’s massive Gothic Revival
masterpiece, the Renaissance
is as much a museum as it is a
hotel, an array of columns and
cornices, mosaics and murals, all
restored to within a dab of their
19
th-century origins.
When asked if there’s anyone
who knows more about the place
than he does, Stock frowns. “No.
I’d be happy to argue that one with
anybody,” he says. “I could talk
about this building for five hours,
just fromwhat’s in my head.”
That’s a good thing, as he
spends about five hours a day
leading tours around here.
Stock first came across the
old St. Pancras station as a boy,
in the 1960s. By then it was derelict,
“
filthy and unloved.” He would watch
the windows, waiting for ghouls to
appear. Later in life, he worked as a
minder for the ska band Bad Man-
ners, and then in security jobs—one
THE KNOWLEDGE
A former security guard parlays a childhood obsession
into an unlikely career
BY CHRISWRIGHT
of which took him back to the wreck
that had spooked him as a kid, but
this time he got a chance to see the
interior. “I took one look and fell in
love with it,” he says.
That year, 1996, Stock’s firmwas
hired to do security for the site. In his
role as supervisor, Stock was able to
connect with—then work for—the
developer overhauling the property
to create the Renaissance. And
within a month of the hotel’s opening
in 2011, Stock came on as historian.
“
I’ve been very lucky,” he says.
“
Never in a million years did I dream.”
Later, Stock begins his first tour
of the day. “There are 2,300 fleurs-
de-lis painted on these walls,”
he tells the group, beginning a
monologue that barely lets up for 90
minutes. All the information Stock
has at his disposal is self-taught,
the result of an obsessive interest.
“
I could continue my research until
the day I die,” he says, “and I still
wouldn’t know it all.”
