Mohammed Salique owns a
Restaurant called Diwana in
Drummond Street, which runs
west from the side of Euston station. Diwana,
which opened in 1970, claims that it
was the first restaurant in Britain to serve
South Indian vegetarian food. It wasn’t the
first Asian food outlet in the street: Ambala,
now a chain of shops selling Indian
sweets, opened in 1965, catering to the immigrants
from India and Bangladesh (then
East Pakistan) who had started moving into
the Victorian terraces in the area. Their arrival
galvanised a district long blighted by
the noisy steam trains that thundered in
and out of Euston; Drummond Street became
the heart of the community. When
the main line out of Euston was electrified
in the mid-1960s and steam engines were
replaced by diesels, Drummond Street and
the surrounding area began to prosper. In
the 1970s a battle was fought by local squatters
– with support from the Asian community
– against a large property company,
Stock Conversion, which wanted to build
offices in the area (they had already built a
huge complex on the other side of the
Hampstead Road). Tolmers Square, which
featured some of the best local architecture,
including one of London’s smallest
cinemas, was lost, but not to the developers:
Camden council used the site to build
social housing. Determined resistance
saved the area for a mixed community, with
a thriving street culture of small shops and
cheap restaurants. There are few neighbourhoods
like it in central London, but its
days may be numbered.
Until the 1960s, Drummond Street continued
to meet Eversholt Street on the east
side of Euston, but this section of the road
disappeared, along with the Euston Arch,
when the present station was built. There
was considerable opposition to the demolition
of the arch, the original entrance to the
station, built in 1837, but British Railways
successfully argued that it would cost nearly
£200,000 to reconstruct, compared with
just £25,000 to demolish (the stones were
dumped in a flood relief channel for the
River Lea in East London). Now, once again,
the railway is threatening Drummond
Street. Euston has been designated the
London terminal for High Speed Two, the
330-mile railway that will link the capital
with Birmingham and then split to run, in
a Y shape, north-west to Manchester and
north-east to Leeds. Diwana is just outside
the proposed footprint of the new station
but, as Salique puts it, ‘There will be this
Berlin Wall between us and the station
which is actually the source of many of our
customers. They come here with maybe
thirty minutes to wait for their train and
they know they can get a meal served quickly.
We’re faster than McDonald’s.’ Worse,
Drummond Street is earmarked to be the
entrance for lorries into the site, hundreds
of them every day, backing up along the
narrow street, making things impossible
for Diwana and the half-dozen or so other
restaurants.
In the mid-19th century, the construction
in quick succession of Euston, King’s
Cross and St Pancras resulted in the demolition
of much of Somers Town, the area
just to the north of the three. The stations
were built outside what was then the city
boundary because a Royal Commission
banned the construction of any stations
within it, fearing precisely the kind of destruction
that now threatens parts of Camden.
When a project is seen to be of national
significance, the interests of the people
who have the bad luck to be in its way are
never going to be of primary importance.
With every decision, there will be losers.
Consultation, one supporter of HS2 told
me, ‘is merely a device to allow people to let
off steam. It is very rare that their concerns
result in a change.’ But it’s possible also to
have sympathy for supporters of the project:
at times it must seem impossible to get
anything done in our cumbersome and bureaucratic
democracy. They point enviously
to France, where things seem to happen
faster, though that isn’t always the case: the
TGV goes to Nice but not yet on a highspeed
line, as a result of local protests.
Jim Steer is HS2’s biggest fan. The former
chief railway planner at the Strategic
Rail Authority and founder of the transport
consultancy Steer Davies Gleave, he believes
the project is essential for Britain’s
future welfare. ‘Do you know what the population
of Britain will be in 2085?’ he asks,
and then answers his own question: ‘85
million. Where will all those people go?
London can only accommodate a couple of
million or so. The rest will have to be elsewhere.
And if we are to avoid terrible
sprawl, they must be concentrated in cities
and those cities must have excellent connections
with London.’ Without HS2, Steer
argues, the green belt and vast swathes of
unprotected countryside will have to be developed.
If provision isn’t made for rail,
then they will be forced onto the roads.
‘HS2 is all about capacity, not speed,’ he
says, ‘and that should have been made clear
from the start.’
As soon as the document High Speed Rail,
which sets out HS2’s route, was published
by the Labour government in 2010, local
action groups began to form. Attempts to
form a united opposition have foundered
on differences over aims and tactics, but
even if these groups don’t feel able to work
together, they have nevertheless managed
to win over much of the public. Until very
recently, the focus was almost entirely on
the Chilterns. TV journalists were dispatched
to carry out interviews with angry
locals against a backdrop of fields, fences
and furry animals. There was also a legal
challenge led by 51M, a collection of local
authorities and residents’ groups: £51 million
was the original estimated cost of HS2
per parliamentary constituency (£33 billion
divided by 650). The challenge failed
last year, and while there is a possibility of
a European hearing, it is unlikely to derail
the process.
The legal challenge cost several hundred
thousand pounds and the HS2 Action Alliance
has funded expensive reports from
consultants, but another group, Stop HS2,
has had to launch an appeal to pay its co-ordinator,
Joe Rukin, who is self-employed;
in December he was paid just £380, which
Rukin said had forced him to ‘reconsider
his position’. Despite this group’s lack of
funds, supporters of HS2 have tended to
dismiss the ‘antis’ as well-heeled Buckinghamshire
residents, more interested in
protecting local house prices than the
countryside. But damage to the environment
isn’t really the issue either. There was
a fuss over the construction of the Channel
Tunnel Rail Link (now known as High
Speed One), but its footprint turned out to
be rather light. There would undoubtedly
be some damage to the countryside in the
Chilterns and huge disruption during the
construction period, and it doesn’t help
that locals will see so little benefit, since
there won’t be a station in the area (it would
slow the trains down). But the residents of
Camden have a lot more to worry about.
The plans for Euston would result in the
demolition of a number of blocks of flats.
The plans are fluid, so it is unclear how
many homes will be lost, but the current
figure is 226 – twice the total along the rest
of the line – with a further 250 at risk.
The compensation terms are seen as
derisory
by local residents. ‘Compensation
and compulsory purchase legislation is
archaic and complex,’ it says in a leaflet
produced by Knight Frank, the property
consultancy on the scheme. Unfathomable
would be a better way of putting it. In
France, the state buys homes at full market
price in a band of 150 metres on either side
of land affected by a scheme of national importance,
but in the UK only those within a
very narrow band – 60 metres on either side
– qualify. An exceptional hardship scheme
designed to compensate those outside this
zone is discretionary. Much of the anger in
the Chilterns was over houses that lie just
beyond the 60 metre limit. There is a
scheme for businesses but the same limit
applies: Mohammed Salique reckons he
will get nothing.
In the ranks of the Camden protesters
are a transport planner, an architect, an
urban-planning academic and various other
professionals. They are hedging their
bets: if they can’t stop the scheme, they
hope they can at least mitigate the damage.
In a spartan community centre under a grey
tower block on Eversholt Street, just north
of Euston, they laid out an alternative plan
for the station which involves two decks on
top of each other, one for conventional services,
the other for high-speed trains. This
would limit the footprint of the railway and
therefore reduce the need for demolition.
Their well-organised campaign against the
shoddiness of the scheme for Euston has
borne fruit: the plans for the whole area are
currently being reconsidered.
The issue is whether the pain inflicted
on the few is worth the gain for the many.
The fate of the HS2 project should not and
cannot be determined by angry locals. A
national scheme now estimated to cost £50
billion (this figure includes a contingency
of £14 billion and rolling-stock costs of
around £7 billion) is bound to be controversial.
To counter the objections, the case
for HS2 needs to be overwhelming. And it
is not.
The French use their LGV (Lignes à
Grande Vitesse) for postal services as well
as passenger trains and the TGV shares the
tracks with conventional services at the
Paris terminuses, but broadly speaking, highspeed
railways are the motorways of the rail
network: they are used solely by fast passenger
trains running on dedicated tracks
and making few stops. The world’s first
high-speed line, the Shinkansen service between
Tokyo and Osaka, opened in 1964
and ran at what today would be seen as the
relatively low speed of 200 kilometres per
hour. Most high-speed services now run at
300 kph and many would be able to go even
faster – though fuel burn increases exponentially
beyond that point.
In Britain we have long had High Speed
Train 125s, the excellent rolling stock that
has provided the bulk of InterCity trains for
nearly forty years. But since they do not run
on dedicated lines and operate at a maximum
of 125 mph, they aren’t usually described
as high-speed trains. In fact, the
InterCity
125 developed out of problems
with the Advanced Passenger Train project
in the late 1960s and 1970s. This was a train
which, by virtue of being able to tilt around
bends, rather like a motorcyclist leaning
into a corner, would be capable of running
at speeds of 155 mph on conventional
tracks. The target was to complete the
nearly 400-mile trip between Glasgow and
London in three hours. After a difficult
testing period the train briefly entered service,
first in 1981 and again in 1984, but the
experiment was abandoned after a series of
technical failures – and after journalists on
one of the press trips got travel sick. The
125 service had already been introduced, in
1976, at which point it was the second fastest
in the world, surpassed only by the
Shinkansen network.
Meanwhile, high speed had arrived in
Europe. The French opened their first LGV,
between Paris and Lyon, in 1981 and now
have a network of just over 2000 km. Spain
is the European country with the most
high-speed track (3100 km), second in the
world only to China. British Rail, happy
with the slower but hugely popular Inter-
City 125s, focused instead on incremental
improvements, such as straightening curves
and improving signalling. Even the Channel
Tunnel, completed in 1994, was initially
not linked to London by a high-speed
line; without it, the journey to Brussels and
Paris took more than half an hour longer. It
was only when François Mitterrand embarrassed
the British government in his speech
at the opening of the Channel Tunnel in
1994 by observing that at least visitors to
the UK would have time to admire the Kent
countryside that plans for what is now HS1
were pursued in earnest.
Along with Eurostar, the 67-mile line
now carries domestic trains to various locations
in Kent as well as a couple of freight
trains at night. The stations built at Stratford,
Ebbsfleet and Ashford in order to increase
use of the line and stimulate regeneration
in those areas were all given the
grand appellation ‘International’, though
Eurostar trains don’t stop at Stratford and
probably never will. The fact is that with a
maximum of eight trains an hour, including domestic services, the line is operating
at less than half its potential capacity.
Deutsche Bahn has floated the idea of running
services on the line but has been deterred
by the high track charges, technical
barriers and overbearing security arrangements:
any station on the Continent where
passengers board for the Tunnel has to have
stringent and very expensive procedures to
scan luggage and passengers. HS1, which
opened fully in 2007, has now been sold on
a 30-year lease to a Canadian pension fund
for £2.1 billion, a mere third of the cost of
construction. The terrible economics explain
why there has never been any talk of
HS2 being built by private interests, or even
of its attracting significant private investment.
Despite the Tories’ ideological dislike
of public sector projects, HS2 is wholly
government-funded. Infrastructure projects
can, of course, have enormous benefits
for society beyond the merely economic,
and subsidy is therefore justified. This is
something that politicians for the most
part choose to ignore except, oddly, when
it comes to a huge project like HS2, when
suddenly almost limitless public money is
made available.
The idea of a north-south highspeed
line first emerged when Alastair
Morton, who had been the chairman
of Eurotunnel, was appointed to run
the Strategic Rail Authority,
created by John Prescott in 1999 to give direction to
the privatised industry. Morton commissioned
a report from Atkins and Ernst &
Young to assess whether there was a need
for such a line. By the time they reported in
2003, Morton – who was too outspoken to
occupy such a sensitive government post
for long – had been replaced. Alistair Darling,
the longest-serving New Labour
transport
minister, whose heart was always
in his wallet, was adamantly opposed to the
scheme. A report into Britain’s transport
infrastructure needs by former British Airways
CEO Rod Eddington, published in
2007, was lukewarm about the idea of a
high-speed line, though promoters of the
scheme point out that the Treasury wrote
the report and that Eddington was more
supportive later on when speaking to the
House of Commons Transport Committee.
In 2006, Jim Steer set up a lobbying
Organisation called Greengauge 21, and it
sent out a manifesto calling for a highspeed
line to every MP. The following year,
HS1 opened, exposing the fact that while
France, Italy, Spain and Germany all had
extensive high-speed networks, Britain had
no plans for any new lines. The Tories
sprang a surprise at the 2008 party conference
when Theresa Villiers, the shadow
secretary of state for transport, announced
that the party would support the construction
of a north-south high-speed line. The
proposed scheme was a strange one, an
S-shaped line that would go from London
via Birmingham to Manchester and then
across the Pennines to Leeds (which would
be reached in much the same time as the
present two and a quarter hours). At the
time, Andrew Adonis was the number two
transport minister. A long-time devotee of
the railways, having joined the Cotswold
Line Promotion Group as a teenager in the
1980s, he began pushing for Labour to support
a new north-south line. Geoff Hoon,
the transport secretary, announced in January
2009 that the government backed a
third runway for Heathrow. Adonis persuaded
him that to soften the blow for the environmental
lobby he should at the same
time announce the creation of a government
company, High Speed Two Ltd, to
consider the options for a new high-speed
rail network. It was to report quickly with a
‘costed and deliverable proposal for a new
line from London to Birmingham’.
The line was to operate at 400 kph –
which means few curves and low gradients
– and had to emphasise connections to
Heathrow. Given these constraints, the only
viable route was via Old Oak Common, six
miles west of Euston, where the line could
connect with Crossrail, the east-west route
through London currently under construction.*
From there, it would continue to a
Station near Birmingham Airport, with a
spur to a new terminus at Curzon Street,
almost a mile from the present station
at New Street. This first phase is currently
the subject of a hybrid bill in Parliament,
part of the tortuous mechanism by which
the new line will get planning permission.
That process is expected to take two years,
as objectors (known officially as ‘petitioners’)
are given the opportunity to state
their case. If there are no major setbacks
and the political parties hold firm, construction
is expected to start in 2017. The
second phase, north of Birmingham, will
be the subject of a further hybrid bill and
will not be completed until 2033.
Grassroots Tory Party members are, for
the most part, deeply sceptical – I have
spoken
at fringe meetings at Tory conferences
where the mood could best be described
as hostile – yet David Cameron and even
George Osborne appear genuinely committed
to the project. They see it as a way of
boosting business and of demonstrating
their credentials as modernisers. They also
believe it will help their electoral prospects
in in the North. The fate of HS2 doesn’t just
lie in the coalition’s hands, however, but
with the Labour opposition, which could
probably
kill the project by withdrawing its
support. Merely by saying at last September’s
Labour Party Conference that there
was to be ‘no blank cheque for HS2’, the
shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, caused widespread
panic. The Lib Dems are definitely
onside, claiming it was their idea in the first
place.
The result of the rather haphazard genesis
of the scheme is, unsurprisingly, a
mass of compromises. In the baldest terms,
there are to be four terminus stations in
London, Birmingham, Manchester and
Leeds, and four parkways (including Old
Oak Common; if Crewe is added, there will
be five) connected by some 330 miles of
railway. There will be just three connections
to the existing rail network: the line
has more in common with a motorway
than a trunk road linking many places. The
line speed, at 400 kph, will be the fastest in
the world, but at first the trains are expected
to run at 300 kph, possibly rising to 340
kph. Some of the trains will be built with a
European loading gauge, which means they
will be too large to continue their journey
on the existing rail network (they couldn’t
get through the tunnels).
Andrew Adonis, in making his case for
the scheme, emphasised the economic and
environmental benefits, the speeding up of
services and the need for extra capacity to
reduce overcrowding. Much of this reasoning
has since unravelled. First to go was
the environmental argument. The original
document which set out the scheme – High
Speed Rail, published in March 2010 – estimated
the potential change in carbon emissions
over the next sixty years resulting from
a high-speed line from London to the West
Midlands at between -25 million tonnes
and +26.6 million tonnes. In other words,
the line was as likely to increase carbon
consumption as reduce it. The reasons for
this disappointing result are that 57 per
cent of travellers would be shifting from
conventional rail, which uses less fuel, and
that a further 27 per cent of journeys would
be generated by the existence of the line.
Only 16 per cent would transfer from car or
plane, which are potentially environmentally
more damaging – though cars are becoming
increasingly fuel efficient, a factor
the document did not take into account.
Environmentalists, who tend to love
trains and hate cars, face the greatest dilemma
over HS2. Prominent figures like
George Monbiot and John Whitelegg are
adamantly opposed. ‘The whole project is
characterised by overblown rhetoric about
economic growth,’ Whitelegg wrote in 2012,
‘reducing the north-south divide and making
the nation more prosperous. It is of
course nothing like this at all. It is a very
expensive,
very environmentally damaging,
very badly thought through transport project.’
Given that it would be used mainly
by people in the 50 per cent tax bracket,
he added, it was a ‘reverse Robin Hood
strategy’. The Campaign for Better Transport
is torn. It likes the idea of the increased
rail capacity, but questions the scheme’s
use of parkway stations that will be reached
by car. There are worries, too, about how
existing lines will be affected. Will services
to towns left off the route be kept up or will
they deteriorate? There are currently four
services an hour from London to Coventry,
thanks to the fact that the trains continue
to Birmingham. Will all of those survive?
CBT wants to see more rail freight, but there
is no guarantee that the freed capacity
will
be available or needed for goods trains.
With the environmental case gone, the
scheme’s supporters in the early days tended
to emphasise the speed of the line – a
mere 49 minutes between London and Birmingham
Curzon Street compared with 82
minutes on the fastest Virgin service. That
was an own goal, as they now admit: £17
billion (at 2011 prices) is a lot to spend on
cutting the journey-time to Birmingham by
half an hour.
Next, the scheme’s supporters turned to
capacity. Anyone who has tried to get on a
Pendolino to Birmingham or Manchester
on a Friday night would take the point:
there’s barely even room to stand. But this
is the result of Virgin’s pricing policy, which
charges premium fares on trains leaving
Euston before 6.46 p.m.: a single ticket to
Manchester at peak time is £113; an offpeak
ticket bought in advance can be as
little
as £19. The truth is that the line is not
overcrowded. Data obtained by Chris Stokes,
a consultant and former network director
at the Strategic Rail Authority with responsibility
for assessing new lines, show that
long-distance trains leaving Euston were on
average 52 per cent full at the evening peak.
This is lower than at other London stations,
where no such huge increase in capacity
is being sought (Alistair Darling last
year argued that money should be spent on
commuter routes rather than long-distance
travel).
The case therefore boils down to growth
in demand. HS2 Ltd used very optimistic
forecasts: an overall increase in passenger
numbers on the InterCity routes out of Euston
of 267 per cent by 2033. Half of this is
based on an underlying trend rate of 2.2 per
cent annually – if no line were built – and
the rest on new passengers, either
making
journeys they wouldn’t have made otherwise,
or switching from other modes of
transport. It is true that passenger
numbers
have doubled in the past twenty years.
On the West Coast mainline, a £9 billion
upgrade and Virgin’s introduction
of the
new Pendolino trains and more frequent
services have, indeed, resulted in a rate of
increase in passenger numbers higher than
on the rest of the network. Steer notes that
rail’s share of long-distance journeys –
those over 25 miles – went up from 8 per
cent to 14 per cent between 1996 and 2012,
as taxes on company cars were increased,
car ownership in London declined and it
became easier to use mobile devices on
trains. However, to extrapolate this growth
over the next twenty years is optimistic in
the extreme, according to Stokes: ‘I believe
there will be significant growth in rail demand,’
he says, ‘but if it’s half the amount
forecast by HS2 – still more than double
present levels – the business
case for HS2
would collapse, as the scale of the benefits
delivered directly relates to passenger volumes.’
We have been here before. HS1 was
expected to carry 25 million international
passengers by 2006: it reached ten million
just last year. The excuse given by the original
forecasters, Steer included, is that the
emergence of low-cost airlines damped
down demand, but that merely shows how
vulnerable to unexpected developments
such growth forecasts can be.
The formulation of business cases for
such projects has led to the development of
a specialised industry that adds vastly to
the costs of such schemes but provides
little
decisive evidence. It works like this:
the costs of the project, of both its construction
and its operation, are set against
its benefits. It is in the assessment of the
benefits that the voodoo economics come
into play. The benefits are taken to consist
largely of time-savings made by users,
which are given a monetary value. So an
hour’s time saved by a rail passenger is valued
at £36.96; for the occupant of a taxi it
is £44.69, while an hour of a cyclist’s
time
is worth only £17. More than two-thirds of
the assumed benefits come from these
time-savings, which completely disregard
the time that people now spend productively
on trains with the help of their mobile
phones and laptops. Indeed, I have written
large chunks of this article on a Pendolino,
and could have got more of it done that way
had the journey been longer, which suggests
that the time I saved by taking a fast
service might even have been negative.
Most of the rest of the benefits consist of
‘wider economic impacts’: businesses do
better, the argument goes, when they are
closer together because of economies of
scale and easier access to markets.
Even when these assumptions about
time-savings and economic impact are
granted, the business case has struggled to
reach the minimum benefit-cost ratio of 2
demanded by the Department for Transport.
The ratio has declined slightly as HS2
Ltd has refined the scheme; it is currently
reckoned to be 2.7, and just 1.7 if only the
line to the West Midlands is taken into consideration.
This is poor in relation to road
schemes, which routinely have a benefitcost
ratio twice as high, and well below
flood-prevention schemes, which, as Chris
Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency,
highlighted during the recent crisis, required
a benefit-cost ratio of at least 8 to be
sanctioned by the Treasury. And all this is
leaving aside the dependence of the HS2
business case on the accuracy of the growth
forecast.
The clear weakness of the business case
has led even supporters of the scheme to
play down its importance. They are left
with little but clichés. The line is ‘vital for
Britain if we’re going to succeed in the
global race’ (David Cameron); ‘HS2 is a very
important part of the wider revamping and
modernisation’ of UK infrastructure (Nick
Clegg); ‘HS2 connects up the economic
heart of the country’ (Andrew Adonis).
And so on. The methodology on which the
case for HS2 rests has been quietly set aside
by its supporters, who now claim that the
arguments were never about business
anyway.
HS2 is just one big punt. That would be
fine if it were a project that could live up to
the claims for it made by politicians of all
three parties. But it can’t. Henry Overman,
professor of economic geography at the
LSE, was once a paid adviser to the scheme.
‘HS2 is poor value for money compared
with other transport plans,’ he wrote in the
Daily Telegraph on 16 November 2013, ‘and
may well be poor value for money compared
with alternatives that address exactly
the same set of problems. If politicians
understand
all of this and decide to go for
HS2 anyhow, then that is their call and we
can hold them to account at the ballot box.
What worries me, as I watch the debate, is
that they seem convinced that the evidence
suggests that HS2 is a fantastic project. It
doesn’t; and it’s not . . . HS2 isn’t an awful
project on that basis, but it isn’t a great one
either.’
The muddled thinking over the aims of
HS2 comes out most clearly in the issue of
its potential connection with Heathrow.
The route was designed to head west to
start with because the remit required it to
connect in some unspecified way with
Heathrow. It then became clear that few
people from outside London wanted to
go to Heathrow and that Londoners themselves
were well served by the existing rail
connections, the Heathrow Express and
the Piccadilly Line. HS2 Ltd’s own document
admitted that ‘the total market for accessing
Heathrow from the West Midlands,
North-West, North and Scotland is currently
around 3.7 million trips. Our modelling
suggests relatively little of this would
10 4 April 2014
shift to HS2, with the rail share increasing
by less than 1 percentage point (about 2000
passengers per day, or just over one train
load each way).’ Heathrow was left off the
direct route, a decision endorsed in a report
produced for HS2 Ltd by Brian Mawhinney,
a former Tory transport secretary;
instead, passengers coming from the North
would get there by changing to Crossrail at
Old Oak Common. So, the route of the line
is determined by the need to connect with
Heathrow, but the line will not now connect
with Heathrow.
Faced with a well-organised opposition
and, worse, a growing general
scepticism, the supporters of the project
have begun to fight back. In January
David Higgins, former head of the Olympic
Delivery Authority and more recently the
chief executive of Network Rail, was appointed
as chairman of HS2. Higgins, an
Australian and an engineer, was no doubt
drawn by the excitement of another grand
project after the day-to-day banalities of
railway management, the intricacies of
regulationand the constant pressure over
performance.
He immediately pinched a couple of
People from Network Rail: Simon Kirby,
who was in charge of major projects (including
huge station renewals at Birmingham,
Reading and London Bridge), and Tom
Kelly, a communications strategist versed
in the dark arts – he was Alistair Campbell’s
successor at Number Ten. Higgins undertook
a review of the project and the results,
in the form of a new document, HS2 Plus,
were presented on 17 March in the gothic
gloom of Manchester Town Hall (which always
doubles in TV dramas for the Houses
of Parliament). Higgins’s report had obviously
been cleared with the government.
The emphasis had shifted. There was no more
talk of fast journey times or environmental
benefits. Instead, as the venue for the
launch demonstrated, the new sell is that
the scheme will reduce the north-south divide.
Higgins suggested that the first phase
of the scheme should no longer stop at
Birmingham
but go on to Crewe, where a
station should be built to improve interconnectivity
– the new buzzword – between
northern towns. So, as well as the two stations
in London, there will be two in Birmingham,
one apiece in Leeds and Manchester,
one between Derby and Nottingham
(at Toton), one close to Sheffield
(Meadowhall) and now probably one in
Crewe. Four of these stations will be terminuses,
with limited connectivity, and the
rest are essentially parkway stations or, in
the case of Old Oak Common, designed for
interchange. But people want trains that go
into city centres, not parkway stations, which
merely encourage more car travel.
Oddly, the other two main changes presented
to the press in Manchester concerned
the capital. First, the partial reconstruction
of Euston will be abandoned. Instead,
the station will be replaced by a new
one, as yet not designed. This makes sense:
the current station has never been popular,
and the site offers a huge development opportunity
that could attract private capital
(as at King’s Cross) but also allay some of
the local opposition. However, it remains
unclear whether the new scheme would allow
some of the council blocks earmarked
for demolition to stand, and the impact on
Drummond Street is likely to be unchanged.
Second, Higgins suggested scrapping the
link between HS2 and HS1, for two reasons:
the ridiculous £700 million cost for a
few miles of railway between Old Oak Common
and Camden, and because part of it
would have to run along the North London
line, a highly successful commuter and
freight track recently revamped at huge
cost. This decision rather undermines one
of the fundamental reasons for HS2. Without
the European connection, travellers to
the Continent will have to trudge half a
mile along the Euston Road, or possibly
stand on a long travelator – though the British
Library inconveniently blocks the way.
The prospect might be enough to deter the
few people – even HS2 Ltd reckoned there
would be only a handful of trains a day linking
cities north of London with the Continent
– who would choose to go by train
rather than fly, say, between Birmingham
and Brussels.
The fundamental problem with HS2 is
that its origin as a sop to environmentalists,
not as a considered response to need,
has skewed its development and planning.
In a rational world, the process would have
started with an assessment of the rail network’s
needs and, in particular, of the existing
connections between towns. There has
been no shortage of alternative suggestions
from within the industry. Two experienced
engineers, Quentin Macdonald and Colin
Elliff, have published a very detailed plan,
High Speed UK. Their objection
to HS2 is that ‘it does very little to improve the
network,and concentrates connectivity on
London.’ The high-speed network, in their
view, should be an adjunct to the existing
railway rather than a quasi-replacement for
it. It should be designed as a network, not
a route, an entirely different philosophy much
more in keeping with railway history and
usage. Elliff and Macdonald would ditch
Old Oak Common and open up a route
that runs largely along the M1 corridor.
Their scheme would improve links between
city pairs. ‘There are 528 city pairs in the
UK,’ Eliff says, ‘and links are improved in
only 6 per cent by HS2 whereas in our
scheme almost all, 498 – or 94 per cent – of
them will have better journey times.’
It is probably too late for such a radical
alternative to be put forward. If the present
scheme were killed off, it is unlikely that it
would be because a better one were being
considered. There are few objective analysts
of HS2. On the one side there is the
large group of consultants, engineers, project
managers and so on who stand to gain
directly from it. On the other side are those
who have the most to lose or are, like the
Institute of Directors, sceptical of largescale
government projects. One impartial
analyst is Peter Hall, Britain’s best-known
planning academic. He thinks the scheme
should be given an amber light. In an article
in Built Environment published late last
year, he wrote that the future of HS2 depended
on two critical elements, the value
of time spent on the train and its ‘wider
economic impacts’. The case for regeneration
is uncertain, he says, and requires much
further analysis. He concludes that there
is no need for urgency ‘either to proceed
with the project or to cancel it’. HS2 ‘will
almost certainly be needed one day. The
key question is what day? . . . there could
be no harm, and a great deal of merit, in
waiting.’ Given the changes now being
proposed to the scheme, the pressure to
concentrate more on the North, and the
weakness of the business case, this would
make sense. But very little about HS2 has
made sense, and politicians, nervous of being
seen to dither, are always in a hurry.