“Enjoy this piano – it’s a gift!” When Elton John played a brief piano medley of his hits on the concourse of St Pancras railway station in 2016 – pausing to scribble a brief message on the instrument which, he announced, he was donating to the station – he can’t have known what he had started.
In the years since, the upright black Yamaha, still bearing the singer’s message and autograph, has been played by many thousands of people passing through the central London station – and a stampede of well known faces too, including Jools Holland, John Legend, Tom Odell and Jeff Goldblum.
On Monday it was the turn of Alicia Keys to tinkle the now slightly battered ivories, in front of a small crowd of bemused passengers freshly discharged from the Eurostar. Rod Stewart, too, was there last week – though he shunned Elton’s piano in favour of an 11-piece band including his own baby grand, played by Holland.
Forget Wembley – if you have an album to promote (and both Stewart and Keys do), there’s only one place to be seen, and that’s between Mac Cosmetics and Accessorize at the bottom of the lift to St Pancras platforms 1-4. Viral social media content is guaranteed.
Which is all very well, but when it’s not being hogged by Grammy winners, the St Pancras piano (in fact there are two) was intended to be played by ordinary people, simply for their own enjoyment and that of others.
So it was one mid-morning this week when, as the station settled into its daily bustle, Anastasios Pagonidis sat down to play. The 19-year-old, originally from Greece, is partially sighted and told the Guardian he was homeless – he comes every day, he said. “I don’t have a piano where I am.”
As Pagonidis powered expertly through a virtuoso selection of Greek standards and self-compositions, a few commuters paused to listen, with others checking their stride to glance over approvingly or smile.
Pagonidis has been playing since he was nine. What did the piano mean to him? “It means – myself,” he said simply. As he was speaking, a woman wheeling two large bags rushed over to interrupt: “Excuse me, where is the lift?”
Next was the turn of Joseph Smith, who might easily have pursued a career as a musician had he not been diverted into his current role developing software for the Guardian. In his spare time Smith is accompanist to a choir of homeless people called the Choir with No Name – “I cram as much music as I can around the edge of my job,” he said.
As Smith settled into the opening bars of John’s Tiny Dancer, Wendy and John Gornall, in London for a pre-Christmas break from their home in Preston, paused to listen. Having a piano in a public space “definitely adds something”, said Wendy. “It’s fantastic to listen to someone who can really play – you’re just in awe of them.”
The street piano trend can perhaps be traced to an abandoned instrument in Sheffield in the early noughties, but began to capture the public imagination in 2008 when the artist Luke Jerram installed secondhand instruments across Britain with the invitation: “play me, I’m yours”.
Dozens have since sprung up in the UK and further afield, inspiring the hit Channel 4 show The Piano earlier this year – which prompted the Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang, a judge on the show, to give his own St Pancras performance (like Stewart, though, he brought his own instrument).
Back on the concourse, Smith had moved on to White Christmas, prompting wide smiles and a few more passersby stopping to listen. “It just makes everyone happy to hear the piano,” said Hannah Gault, who was catching a connection to a carol concert in Liverpool. She had allowed extra time in her journey, she said, to make sure she’d be able to check out the station pianos.
“As long as someone was playing the piano, I wouldn’t really mind what it was,” she said. “It just makes my day.”
At the other end of the station concourse, on the second, slightly less fancy piano between Paul Express cafe and some escalators, 10-year-old Heidi Arieh was giving a delicate rendition of I Dreamed a Dream while being filmed by her beaming mother, Leonora. The pair, from York, were en route to Paris, and were charmed by the fact that so many famous musicians had preceded them at the station.
“I’m really blown away by that, because I think people leave energies wherever they go,” said Leonora. Her daughter had never had lessons, playing only by ear, she said: “It just brings her joy.”
At which point she was interrupted by an extremely drunk man holding an open bottle of red wine who asked, in a manner of speaking, if he could have a turn. It was time for mother and daughter to leave. Elton John never had to put up with this.
