HS2. The Wrecking Begins

Reverend Anne Stevens and local resident Jo Hurford, Euston Square Gardens

On Friday the Reverend Anne Stevens, vicar of St.Pancras Church, spent two hours chained to a 100 year-old plane tree outside Euston station, whilst local residents handed out leaflets to passing commuters. Work has already started around the planned London end of the HS2 high speed rail link to Birmingham, but the protest marked a significant escalation in the disruption which will turn the area into a building site for an estimated 17 years. On Monday Euston Square Gardens will be fenced off, and the felling of its century-old trees will begin, clearing the park to make way for construction vehicles, expected to average 650 trucks a day.

As many have pointed out, HS2 as planned is seriously flawed. It is extremely expensive (and getting pricier by the week), poorly integrated with the existing network, and its London terminal is in the wrong place, a densely populated area already home to three of the capital's principal railway stations. To cap it all comes news that Carillion, one of the major contractors involved in construction of the new line, is in serious financial difficulty.

Whilst all taxpayers will be forking out the cash for this, local residents have the added nightmare of living through it, windows closed, day in day out for almost two decades.  More pictures here.  More words and pictures here and here.

Money Down the Train

Little Missenden, Buckinghamshire

The public consultation on phase two of the HS2 high speed rail line began this week, amid signs that the cross-party consensus in favour of the project may be starting to break down. Lord Mandelson called it “an expensive mistake”, and Tom Harris MP, rail minister in the Labour government that initiated the scheme, admitted the original cost calculations were done “on the back of a fag packet”.

There seems to be a new development in the HS2 saga almost every other day. In recent weeks the estimated cost has risen from £32 billion to £53 billion, Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, has called the government's business case “farcical”, and HS2 Ltd, the government-owned company charged with building the new railway, has apparently looked again at a previously rejected alternative proposal for the Euston terminal which would avoid the need to demolish hundreds of homes in the Regent’s Park Estate (below). If accepted, it would be the third design for the station in as many months, and a major rethink very likely to impact on the newly revised cost estimate.

Outside Westminster, apart from some politicians and business leaders in Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, there is massive opposition to the scheme from action groups and local authorities along the whole of the route from Euston, through the West Midlands, and northwards. If the political consensus does crumble, the scheme will probably stagger on until the next election, prolonging the blight and uncertainty faced by residents and businesses close to the new line – but what happens then is anybody's guess.

Several blocks on Camden Council's Regent's Park Estate and one of the three towers on Ampthill Square Estate are threatened with demolition

More pictures here
New views of Regent's Park Estate here 

Inside Housing feature here