Terrified traveller ‘camped out’ at St Pancras station to catch last Eurostar train out of the country

Date21 December 2020
Published date21 December 2020
Publication titleMyLondon (England)
Charlotte Mosely was at the station on Sunday December 20 along with hundreds of others when French President Emmanuel Macron announced a temporary suspension to people travelling.

Over 40 countries have now suspended travel to and from the UK in response to reports of a highly infectious 'new strain' of coronavirus emerging.

Charlotte, 28, lives in Paris but was heading back to Kent for Christmas with her family when the new Tier 4 restrictions were announced.

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She told MyLondon: "I got the train into London on Saturday evening. This was after a week of stressing out about whether to come or not.

"I literally got off the train and saw that Boris had cancelled Christmas."

With seeing her parents off the cards Charlotte had to figure out how to get back home to Paris.

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"When I saw that countries were banning travel from the UK, I knew France was going to close the border," she said.

"A friend told me I should just go to camp out at St Pancras to try and get a ticket back. I thought I'd be stuck in England until mid January otherwise."

Unfortunately many others had a similar idea and the situation was tense.

"The station was busier than I've seen it all year. It was packed, people were very stressed," Charlotte said.

"You could feel the tension in the air."

After speaking to station staff she was told there was no more space on the final Eurostar trains back to Paris.

Then the inevitable bad news came. Macron announced a travel ban.

Charlotte was getting desperate.

She added: "I was refreshing the app and all of a sudden I got a ticket on the last train of the...

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