High speed revelations

Published: 13 January, 2011

• I DON’T think Camden residents have yet grasped the impact of the revised routes now proposed for the proposed High Speed 2 rail route, duplicating the train line from Euston to Birmingham.

Three hundred council-owned homes immediately north west of Euston remain the primary victim.  

Primrose Hill residents have succeeded in shunting the route 100 metres north, to their relief, but to new, understandable, chagrin and anxiety along Follows Road and in the Chalcots. But such a superficial understanding conceals three other startling revelations.

First, there will not be two but three bore tunnels through to Kensal Rise – the third to facilitate a link-line to St Pancras. 

That will result in trains hurtling to the surface alongside the nature park on Adelaide Road and just west of the pedestrian bridge to Primrose Hill on Regent’s Park Road. The trains will then thread behind the Roundhouse, through Camden Lock and on to my ward at Camden Road station, where the currently derelict second rail bridge would need to be pressed back into service.

Secondly, there will be ventilation/emergency shafts that could blight development the Alexander and Ainsworth estate because one is proposed at Alexander Place (opposite South Hampstead station) and the other will be right next to the Adelaide Medical Centre.

Thirdly, the financial case against the London terminus being Paddington is built on sand.  

It assumes, for reasons unknown, that a deep tunnel train link, at an enormous cost in excess of £4 billion, would have to be built between Paddington and Euston.  

But there are already ample alternatives, whereas the cost of more than four miles of tunnel under Camden and points west must be at least that cost, which could be saved. 

The other reason given is that hundreds of homes would have to be destroyed to widen the throat of Paddington and to facilitate new long platforms. 

But that’s exactly the same as Euston. 

Could the unspoken explanation be that at Euston demolition would be of hundreds of council flats whereas in Paddington it would be sharper-elbowed owner-occupiers?

CLLR PAUL BRAITHWAITE
Liberal Democrat, Cantelowes ward