Where's the wow factor?

Few places have resisted prettiness as determinedly as King's Cross. Ever since it stopped being open countryside in the 18th century, it has been an area of brutality and squalor: the site first of a smallpox hospital, brick fields and giant dustheaps, and of Agar Town (or "Ague Town"), a slum which one historian called "a byword for urban squalor and disease". Another called King's Cross the "haunt of thieves and murderers".

Next, the place was blasted by the ruthless structures of the industrial age, in the form of the railway stations of King's Cross and St Pancras, and their associated viaducts, goods yards and coal stores. Tens of thousands of people were made homeless during the building of these stations, whose magnificence underlined the misery that surrounded them. From the Gothic luxury of their rooms in the Midland Grand hotel, at the front of St Pancras station, the pampered guests could look directly onto some of the poorest housing in London.

Not even an early attempt at rebranding, when the area's original name of Battle Bridge was changed to the posher-sounding King's Cross, could improve its fortunes. Even now, as the rest of central London spirals upwards in a vortex of gentrification, and despite the police's determined efforts to clean it up, King's Cross still keeps its reputation as a place of drug-dealing and prostitution.

Last week, the developer Argent St George submitted an outline planning application for the ?2 billion redevelopment of the 67-acre site to the north of King's Cross station. This is the latest in a series of attempts to regenerate the area, going back nearly 20 years, and one on which Argent St George has been working since 2000. Given that it is seeking to turn around 200 years of history, you can only admire its optimism.

The planning application is a model of a careful, enlightened approach to development, the opposite of the cruel destructiveness of the Victorian railway builders. The force behind it is Roger Madelin, chief executive of Argent, a man who has swapped the traditional speculator's limo for a bicycle. His master planners are the modernist Allies and Morrison and the classicist Porphyrios Associates, two practices united in a common decency, even if they are from opposing camps. In the new King's Cross, peace will reign, even in architecture's bitter style wars.

Madelin and his colleagues have consulted and reconsulted local residents, listened respectfully to every whim and fancy of conservationists, and picked their way through a bewildering thicket of constraints and requirements - from the engineering needs of the new Eurostar line into St Pancras, to ecologists' concerns for wildlife on Regents Canal.

Once King's Cross was etched in tones of black and brown. Now, in the perspectives and plans of the proposed new scheme, it is rendered in colour washes of pale pastel. It will be mixed use, with eight million square feet of shops and offices, at least 1,800 new homes, and cultural buildings brought together as they are in traditional cities; and sustainable, with the maximum possible use of public transport and bicycles, and ingenious ways of recycling water and energy.

The area's gasometers, storage sheds and coal drops - once the blunt instruments of brute industry, but now listed buildings - will be respectfully restored and cleverly reused. There will be ample open space, in which public art and places for children to play will be skilfully combined but where the landlord's touch, so dominant in places such as Canary Wharf and Broadgate, will be lightly felt. Great care will be taken to manage the shops and bars, so that interesting, one-off businesses should thrive and the area will not be dominated by the big chains.

If all this eventually comes to pass - and it will take at least 15 years - it will be a triumph equal in its way to the building of the great stations. It is not easy to build huge developments in London, as the many years of dereliction at King's Cross testify, and it is still more difficult if the proposed development sets itself Scandinavian levels of civic good order.

It may seem churlish to find any fault with this scrupulous project, yet there still seems something lacking, which is not due only to the fact that the plans are at the outline stage. This something, this ingredient X, is urban drama, the thing that would make people feel excited about living or working in this area. It is the ingredient that inspires films and books and television ...

Old King's Cross had drama in abundance, prompting the black humour of The Ladykillers, set there, and Mike Leigh's High Hopes. But it came at the price of the area's horrors. The question facing the new King's Cross is whether it is possible to be dramatic at the same time as being pleasant.

Certain solutions spring to mind, such as the introduction of "iconic architecture" to jazz the place up with shiny stuff and funny curves, but this is an increasingly overworked response to urban ennui. The deliberate retention of grittiness, in the form of carefully preserved areas of dirt and urban lowlife, does not convince, either: it seems to lead to a future in which developers will hire grime consultants and work to muck quotas, in order to achieve the perfectly calibrated edgy urban district.

Yet there is drama buried in the King's Cross scheme, and it only needs its architects to draw it out. It lies in staking ?2 billion on a 15-yearlong property gamble, and on the struggle for the troubled soul of this area. It lies in the frankly bizarre juxtaposition of industrial structures, once regarded as satanic monsters, with 21st century luxury housing.

It also lies in elements already on the site, such as changes of level, the unexpected appearance of the water of the canal and the abrupt encounters of the enormous and the intimate, of viaducts and little houses.

In the images shown so far of the project, the architects' instinct is to smooth over these contrasts and soften their edges. In the even, gentle sunshine that prevails in the artists' impressions, everything looks equally amiable, and an industrial oddment has much the same feeling as an office block.

Here, perhaps, something can be learned from the Victorians, who celebrated the scale of their achievement with frank ostentation. What is happening at King's Cross is extraordinary, so why make it look normal?