The revamp of St Pancras station, beside King's Cross, has caused a lot of excitement but Angela Pertusiniis still not sure about the area

The new Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) at St Pancras opened last week with unusual fanfare: acres of newspaper coverage, profiles of all the great and good involved in the project and even a BBC2 documentary on the refurbishment of the station rolled out over two nights (complete with sobbing architect, distressed that his steel was 10 inches out of alignment).

OK, the sheer scale of the engineering is impressive but it is the great Gothic façade of St Pancras, which probably counts as one of London's most beloved buildings, that is the real draw.

Built in the 1870s to house the Midland Grand Hotel, it spent much of the second half of the 20th century closed up and unused, championed by architectural historians such as Lucinda Lambton but essentially purposeless. And the CTLR has breathed new life into it as the Manhattan Loft Corporation (oddly enough, founded by a German in London) has taken the building over and restored part of it back into a hotel and the rest into 65 extremely swanky apartments. They sold in a flash (a one-bedder is back on the market at £785,000) but it is the wider regeneration of the area that has got investors hot under the collar.

Because St Pancras sits right next to King's Cross, which for years has had funding directed its way in the hope of turning it around from the sort of area that you walk through very quickly avoiding eye contact, to an urban oasis - a bit of Barcelona dropped down into Camden.

And yes, there is no shortage of huge projects underway but I'm not convinced that the area has turned the corner yet. It's not just that the down and outs, the junkies, the teenage runaways and the hookers and the psychos are still very much in evidence (where are they going to go after all?) it's a sort of terminal sleaziness and air of despair the area has yet to shake off and which fast links to Paris are going to do little to ameliorate.

It's traffic-choked and shabby and low-rent and, apart from its centrality, has little to recommend it but that hasn't stopped an awful lot of speculators getting very excited about it over the past five years. I can't help thinking that prices here have probably stopped rising - despite the spike that the CTRL has caused.

Until last week, any rail passengers from Paris would arrive at Waterloo, at the other end of the Northern Line, just south of the Thames. Perhaps equally as squalid as King's Cross, Waterloo does have the advantage of being the closest station to London's arts quarter - the National Theatre, National Film Theatre, Festival Hall and Hayward Gallery are all a short, ill-lit, litter-strewn walk away.

But ignore this bounty and go one stop further south on the Tube and you arrive at Kennington, a strange mix of elegant Georgian terraces and council estates which, for some reason, has remained strangely ignored by the property boom. Prices have risen there but it never seems to be one of those neighbourhoods that feature in supplements as the new Hackney/Islington/Walthamstow.

Yet, its shops point a previously unimagined chi-chiness, it has fantastic transport links (the City and West End in less than 10 minutes by tube), is close enough to the House of Commons to make it very popular with parliamentary workers and even MPs who cannot afford Westminster and is mainly within the congestion zone - great for anyone needing to drive around central London regularly.

Barratt has just started work on a huge 190-unit development just within the congestion zone on the site of a demolished tower block on Hotspur Street. Prices have yet to be released but, if inner London is your thing, I would take a punt on this over King's Cross any day.

Of course, you may just want to sit tight and see what happens which is what most of Britain with typical apathy is doing. The news that Countrywide, one of the UK's largest estate agency chains, is to start closing branches due to the low level of sales, has been seen as yet another nail in the boom's coffin. With the Bank of England unlikely to lower rates for the foreseeable future as everyday prices for commodities like food and petrol surge, there is little reason to count on widespread house price inflation in the near future.