It would not be the first time that a hurried, ill-considered and spuriously conceived solution to the inadequacies of Britain’s railways would have been imposed upon the population. When pondering such an eventuality, sometimes it’s useful to examine historical precedent, and current television schedules are helping us to do so. In the same week that the route of HS2 north from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds was announced, BBC2 have shown (1) “Beating Beeching” – a celebration of some of Wales’ former steam railways - and (2) the endlessly upbeat, brightly-shirted and lightly-luggaged Michael Portillo travelling on the restored West Somerset Railway, formerly part of the GWR to Minehead. Such lines are very evidently loved and are popular; the affection they arouse speaks of values immensely more profound and valuable than financial profit or efficient transit. An intimacy with the sense a place and an enjoyment of the very experience of travel – and quite possibly a rejection of the shallow present – are among the emotions they engage.
Arguably, half a century ago, Dr Richard Beeching did more than any other single individual to destroy valued components of our national heritage, and the lifestyles, livelihoods, values and imagery that went with them. However, hate figure though he was and remains, just like his lookalike Heinrich Himmler, he was “only obeying orders”. For the government of the day recognised that something had to be done to make the nation’s railways more efficient, and Beeching was their chosen axeman. Unfortunately, the odious Doctor threw out the baby with the bathwater, the baby in this case answering to names like Birmingham Snow Hill and Nottingham Victoria – along with parts of rural and industrial Wales, holiday Cornwall, normal Norfolk, and much else.
We are in a similar situation now. Today, we know that we need high speed rail routes in the UK. Most other developed countries have built them, and anyone who has travelled on such lines overseas, or on HS1, can attest to their attractions and to how they alter one’s perception of distance and of the geographical relations between places. Unfortunately, as with Beeching, the primary motivation for HS2 as presented so far appears to be purely financial and political rather than anything much to do with travel, and its announcement has been accompanied prominently by predictable mantras about “growth” and “regeneration”.
The idea of high speed rail routes is a good and exciting one, reduced journey times can be valuable and speed itself can be fun, but in our enthusiasm for these routes it’s important that we build them for the right reasons and in the right place. Something like HS2, with add-ons, needs to be built, and the sooner the better. Hopefully, what we have been shown so far is only a work-in-progress, and something better will emerge in due course, tempered by discussion, debate, and informed input. For the moment, the plan appears to pose a number of bizarre peculiarities, among them being that the proposed lines:
· Originate from Euston, where there is relatively poor Underground connectivity, and none with Crossrail or Thameslink;
· Do not connect with Eurostar;
· Do not connect to or go via Heathrow;
· Terminate at Curzon Street in Birmingham, thus avoiding the extensive interchange facilities at New Street;
· Pass directly beneath East Midlands Airport without stopping;
· Avoid the city centres of Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield.
One can see the point of hub stations, but not if the time taken to reach them negates the time saved by the faster trains. One suspects a lack of joined-up thinking and of a project being driven purely by economic factors – perhaps spurious ones or those not amenable to reliable estimation - rather than on utility.
It may be argued that if we are going to spend huge sums on high speed rail, why not spend a few more billion to get a network that might actually be useful to real people. What we risk otherwise is another Beeching-style disaster that future generations will have to repair, and which generations even further on will be able to make endearing little TV documentaries about.
For the moment this is a plan bolstered by attempts at cost-benefit quantification. That the figures may be completely wrong doesn’t matter; they have been calculated precisely using impeccably up-to-date techniques and technologies, they are objective, you bet, and the necessary people have been suitably impressed. The sort of people who talk about “train stations”. As always, quantitative wins over qualitative, objective over subjective, hard over soft, simply because they are easier to deal with – valid or not - and to present convincingly.
Subjective, aesthetic, environmental, ethical and personal factors – the ones that matter to most people – are invariably dismissed in decision making of this sort. Sadly, that says a lot about the priorities of those who govern us and, indeed, about the kind of people we are. But just because the powers that be choose to ignore them, such factors haven’t gone away, they never do, and from time to time they’re celebrated by truly intelligent people, as some of them were earlier this week.
Tuesday evening (29 January) saw the return of the wonderful Jonathan Meades to BBC4 in “The Joy of Essex”. Never mind Essex and the gently punning title, Meades is himself a pure joy to watch and to listen to, one of the few mind-expanding legal highs available via a television set, although I know he irritates some people. This time his stereotype-ignoring and cliché-bashing itinerary included examples of early modernism in East Tilbury and Silver End, the relics of doomed utopian communities that occasionally turned dystopic (“the full horror of team spirit”), and – shall we say - specialised places like Frinton, Canvey Island and Jaywick – all, in their way, refuges from the petty tyrannies of governments and bureaucracies. “Under the counter Essex”, homes for “the little people”, the “poor whites”. We need such refuges more than ever today.
Among his many erudite, hilarious, subversive, wackily allusive and laterally-thought observations was one about how we have fetishised Nature, so that we give greater rights to wildlife than we do to mere people, or “homesteaders” as Meades called them in this instance. So, if we accept Meades’ argument, as I do, all those who find their homes and their lives blighted by the prospect of HS2 had better get busy and discover some obscure variety of weed or rodent living on their patch; just saying that they “don’t want HS2 here” will only evoke the sarky “NIMBY” reflex from those trough-snouters who stand to gain from the project or those who smugly live nowhere near the proposed trajectory. Even the remotest hint of a possibility of a rare newt should do the trick and will send the planners scurrying back to their virtual drawing boards. Purely human, quality-of-life concerns won’t do it, I’m afraid.
Meades clearly has a strong feeling for the qualities of places – he observes, he connects apparently disparate ideas together creatively, and he and his articulacy challenge us to follow him. I suspect his trademark verbal extravaganzas sometimes lurch into amused self-parody, but no matter. What he does is to bring meaning and value to the places he visits, an arbitrary, qualititative and subjective process, but one that he shares with us in his uniquely entertaining style. Rather than impoverishing the lives of many while lining the pockets of the few, this is an approach that adds value to life and to our geographical environment, a value that lies way beyond the calculating abilities of the likes of Beeching or the proponents of the current version of HS2.
1 February 2013
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