HS2 and the Great Central : same vision, same mistake

This weekend the BBC News website for Nottingham has a story about a “secret” railway tunnel under the city. This tunnel used to convey the tracks of the Great Central south from Nottingham Victoria, beneath Thurland Street and the Lace Market area, to Weekday Cross and beyond. The only reason the tunnel is “secret” is that it has been disused and blocked off since the late 1960s, when the magnificent  Victoria station was replaced by an inglorious shopping centre of the same name. The photograph below, taken when the station was in its dying days, does not do it justice.

The Great Central was built to high engineering standards and with gentle curves and gradients in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It connected London Marylebone with Aylesbury, Rugby, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield and – via the Woodhead Tunnel – Manchester. Its stations were generally closer to city centres than those of its principal competitor, the Midland Railway, and many of the services it provided were excellent. The entrepreneurial vision of Sir Edward Watkins was that one day it might continue through a Channel Tunnel to Paris.

Construction came after the main boom of railway building, and while splendid in itself, and grandiose in its ultimate ambitions, the line had limited connectivity with the rest of the rail network. That – along with duplication of other routes - was among the reasons for its downfall post-Beeching, and in the late 1960s, it closed. Arguably, had its right of way been preserved rather than being encroached upon and much of its crucial infrastructure dismantled, it could have formed the backbone for HS2. For a long way north of London towards the Midlands the two routes are similar, teasing us with one of those great transport “what ifs”. Thus, half a century ago, a high speed line could have been brought into being without the massive building cost and the environmental blight – including ancient woodlands and residential areas - that the current scheme inflicts. However, it would have suffered from exactly the same problem as does today’s HS2 scheme, namely that it doesn’t connect well with the rest of the system, and much of it is in the wrong place.

To all but the most biased, the drawbacks of HS2 are glaring. Among the deficits, as proposed, are that it terminates at Curzon Street, well away from Birmingham’s cross-country hub at New Street, that its access to Sheffield is poor, to Heathrow it is awkward, and to Leicester non-existent, and above all, that the siting of its East Midlands hub at Toton is inappropriate. The projected line passes directly beneath East Midlands Airport, denying the airport rail access still, and it runs close to a large new commercial development and the major highway intersection near East Midlands Parkway - the obvious and sensible site for the local hub. As I’ve argued before, Toton is the wrong choice because, quite simply, it is in the wrong place, too far north to be of much use to passengers from Derby and Nottingham who want to travel to or from the capital faster and more easily than they can at present. As a rail transport hub for the East Midlands, Toton is a nonsense; it could only appeal to those with vested interests, or oblivious to the facts of geography, or devoid of experience of train travel.

Exactly like the Great Central, HS2 is a grandiose vision that is exciting in principle,  good in parts, and just not good enough in others.  The parallels – more than a century apart - are close.

But to return to the “secret” tunnel. Other former Great Central tunnels, still in existence but similarly “secret”, connect residential areas in the north of Nottingham (Bestwood, Basford, Carrington), with the basement of the Victoria Centre, where they link up with the tunnel that featured in the BBC report. This tunnel continues, as noted above, south to Weekday Cross and almost to Broad Marsh, which is another retail centre that is currently undergoing belated redevelopment. Also, very close by is the NET tram line, which leads to districts south and west of the city. A tram stop for Broad Marsh close to, or even in, the shopping centre, would be attractive. Besides serving the existing tram routes there could be an interchange here with an imaginative utilisation of the old Great Central tunnels. In other words, another cross-city tram route.

 
So many opportunities have been missed over the years, but here is still a chance for some daring connectivity to be exploited. Perhaps the planners from NET should be taken on a tour of the old tunnels.