He is a lumpy Englishman with shaven head, big feet and a small ruck-sack. She is une petite gamine, tender, slender, straight off the Eurostar from Paris and patently pleased to see her Anglo-Saxon lover.

It’s a far cry from Brief Encounter, perhaps the greatest station refreshment room movie ever made. In that 1945 classic, it’s not constipated emotion that prevents Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson getting it together; it’s lack of opportunity.

You just know that this couple will be hitting the sack within the hour; and you just pray that their urgent conjunction will be far from the seedy purlieus of St Pancras station, soon to be unveiled as a gold filling in the mouthful of rotting teeth that is the King’s Cross area of London.

Next month St Pancras will become the new terminal for Eurostar services to Paris and Brussels, replacing Waterloo International. Already restored as a jewel of railway-age Victorian ironwork, the station is now enhanced with The Meeting Place, a 30ft (9m) bronze statue that, as a reference point for trysts secret or otherwise - is intended to rival the clock at Waterloo, the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, or Track 29 at the Pennsylvania Station. “I wanted to create a statue that showed a meeting of minds as well as a physical connection,” Paul Day, the sculptor, said. “The statue is quite static and I think that contrasts well with everything that goes on around it. It is far more enigmatic and emotional than a full-blown snog.”

London and Continental Railways, which has redeveloped the station originally built by William Barlow for the Midland Railway in 1868, wanted something as memorable as the Statue of Liberty to mark a meeting place for travellers under the station clock.

The rail company likes the result, although it wonders if the touching foreheads are just a whisker too risqué. Hmm . . . they should take the train to the Gare du Nord a bit more often.

St Pancras, which reopens on November 14, is set to outshine the French end of the Eurostar line. Like St Pancras, the Gare du Nord is a fine building on the outside. But, like its English counterpart, it is set in one of the less salubrious districts of its capital city. Unlike London, the Paris Eurostar terminal is functional, a little down-at-heel and badly signposted. Apart from mythological figures carved along the roofline, it has no sexy statues.

Ben Ruse, of London and Continental, said yesterday: “The experience travellers will get from the new St Pancras, from top to bottom, will redefine what it’s like to be in a station.”

Sadly Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic masterpiece, the Midland Grand Hotel in front of the station, is not yet ready for business, but is expected to reopen in 2010.

Brief Encounter, based on a Noël Coward play and filmed at Carnforth station, Lancashire, doesn’t actually say that Trevor and Celia never got it together, but it’s not explicit. It was wartime, after all. The St Pancras clinch, by contrast, is an optimistic sign that, however troubled the negotiations on a new EU treaty may be, the entente is cordiale at ground level.

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