27 July 2017
Digging Deep
What will HS 2 achieve?
by J R Thomas
Whatever the pressures on the finances of the country, whatever turmoil assails the senior management, however many rearguard actions the doughty protestors continue to fight, HS2 will soon begin serious construction works. HS2 is the rather anonymous and dull pseudonym of the greatest construction project of our age, the largest length of new railway built in 120 years; since indeed the Great Central Railway, to which long narrow piece of history we will return in due course.
But firstly, a little more on HS2, which follows, surprise, surprise, HS1. HS1 runs from London to Paris; HS2 will run from London to Birmingham. HS1 swoops under the English Channel as it makes its way to the City of Light; HS2 will tunnel through the Chilterns on its way to the Workshop of the World. To be fair, nobody has called Birmingham that for fifty years but that defunct nickname is the ostensible reason and justification for building this particular railway link. Birmingham, like many British regional cities, has lost its way, its wealth, and its style. London has become overwhelmingly the economic powerhouse of the UK; a role that Birmingham had for most of the nineteenth century. (Yes, Leeds, Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow, we know, you were successful city-states, but without a doubt, Birmingham was the premier.)
But somehow, after the Second World War, the regional centres never recovered. The decline had set in after the First World War as Britain’s position in manufacturing and trade went into a slow decline. Destruction by bombing, the dislocation to many industrial activities caused by the switch to war production, the failure to invest adequately post-war, and most of all, the growing socio-political weight of London, just accelerated the decline of the great regional cities. In the 1960’s well meaning but mostly poorly thought out and badly executed investments into the infrastructure of the declining areas achieved very little. Birmingham got a six lane central ring road, a noose which strangled both the city and its suburbs, and the city centre rebuilt in finest 1960’s concrete and cladding, much of the nineteenth historic cityscape vanishing. What was never addressed though was what Birmingham might be for, what it might do, in the brave new post-industrial world.
Much of what Birmingham had done – making things, from shotguns and jewellery to cars and railway carriages, ended. Nothing much new appeared in its place. The growth in the modern western economy in which Britain (let us not forget) is a world leader, was in ideas; the most remunerative employment was in thought-manufacturing. Banking, insurance, IT, the digital economy; that was where the money was, and is. Those new industries grew elsewhere – mostly in the south east. Although employment remains at reasonably high levels in Birmingham and the surrounding West Midlands, comparative levels of earnings have fallen further and further behind that great thought factory a hundred miles south.
So how do you solve that problem? Well; building a £56bn railway is probably not the way to do it. (We should say that a lot of that £56bn will be spent in London and nearby – tunnelling into Euston, building a new terminus, and hiding the railway in the sensitive suburbs.) There are already two railways to Birmingham and they are both quick, reliable, and have been modernised. Investing £28bn, the phase one portion, into sunrise businesses, turning Birmingham into a sort of Silicon Valley of central England might work (though probably not if the money were under the control of politicians and quango placemen). A cynic might indeed suggest that regional cities tend to do better when they are, if anything, worse connected to London, not better. In fact, that cynic might suggest that building a very fast railway line will have the opposite effect to that publicly advocated for it. The beneficiary will be the very strong metropolis at the southern end, not the struggling one at the northern end. Birmingham may well become, unless the city mothers and fathers are very determined and imaginative, a commuter suburb of London, as the Great Wen sucks in cheap labour from the low cost Midlands.
Birmingham is not the only place to which HS2 will reach out its long wavy tentacles; Manchester and Leeds and Sheffield will get connections in due course. Those cities may fare better than Brum; as they are further from London they are less likely to be turned into commuter pools. Manchester in particular has developed as a centre of economic excellence in its own right. The reasons for this are not especially complex; it had for many years a city council chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, who saw his role as no less than to reimagine and reinvent the regional economy. As a result he made Manchester the one UK rival that London has (polite nod to Cambridge which also has achieved a smaller version of a modern techno-bio economy). Manchester has become a centre for many growth businesses, especially centred around what are politely known as the creative and media industries, but also in fashion design and insurance. This was crowned by the BBC’s somewhat unwilling wholesale shift of many operations to Salford, Manchester’s twin city across the Irwell, taking many highly paid executives north, but more importantly, financially anchoring many of the back-up and production processes which support TV and film making.
Manchester has one of the slowest and more unreliable London railway services of any major UK city. Preston, twenty miles to the north west, has a very fast and reliable one; but is one of the most depressed towns in the north west (along with Liverpool). We could continue this game for dozens of locations, but you probably already get the thought. Fast rail services do not seem to make much difference to the prosperity of major cities – except possibly opening them up to the suction of London. Local enterprise and resourcefulness do. That £56bn to be spent to take HS2 to Birmingham and phase 2, (or HS2b, or HS3) to Leeds, Sheffield, and Manchester might well be much better deployed in improving the existing rail network, and excuse our bad language, the motorway system, many worker’s tarmac of choice, and still the most reliable and flexible way of getting around, at least at local level.
But HS2 is going to be built, barring the most extraordinary change of governmental stance. It is unlikely that will happen – there are too many jobs at stake, 16,500 so far (though they could work on small local schemes just as happily). The government is too far committed already – though the same government only last week scrapped the (more advanced) electrification of the Great Western main railway from Cardiff to Swansea, and of the Midland mainline from Nottingham to Sheffield. Which brings us, having taken the scenic route, back to the Great Central Railway, the last mainline to be built in England.
Finished in 1899, it was designed to bring fast railway services to the West End of London from various Midland towns, the GC favouring Leicester, Nottingham, and Sheffield. It was built to the highest standards, with easy gradients and large radius curves, entirely with private capital – and turned a profit, though not as great as its chairman, Sir Edwin Watkin, had hoped for. It was mostly closed down in the 1960’s and 1970’s by British Railways, though a lot of the track bed is still extant. So why not simply and cheaply reopen that, at least for freight trains?
That would fulfil its original purpose. Sir Edward had a grand plan of which the Great Central was just phase 1. That is where you might have heard of him before. He conceived a great railway route from Europe to northern England. Watkin got control of the South Eastern Railway and in 1888 started digging a Channel Tunnel, getting a mile out under the sea before work was stopped for public fear the French could invade through it. Which is how many northern citizens may be feeling before long about HS2 – an economic invasion route into the north for London.
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