HS2: All those sleepless nights, noise and thundering lorries

HOW much thought went into Rishi Sunak’s big HS2 announcement last week, and when will any real details come out?

The prime minister had been under intense pressure to announce something, anything, about HS2.

The Network North policy paper certainly had the feel of something hurriedly scrawled on the back of a fag packet.

Should we be surprised?

This has been the modus operandi of the government and HS2 Ltd since the project began more than a decade ago.

There has only ever been a vague outline for what the brave new HS2 Euston world would look like. No one has ever understood what would go above the station, how tall or what shape the buildings would be.

That’s not to say there haven’t been many eye-catching designs published over the years. One in particular is memorable – featured on the front page of Evening Standard in 2014 – along with exclusive quotes from the then chancellor George Osborne during a tour of China, proclaiming “a really, really big station at Euston”.

Those images showed the Euston Arches standing majestically in front of the kind of glass-domed futuristic flying-car style cityscape you might find in the latest alien blockbuster.

The justification for HS2 always smacked of sci-fi. All part of a great con trick really, looking back.

When asked this week for more detail on its new lean-to Euston station, the Department for Transport literally had nothing to say. Likewise HS2 Ltd, which said they had received new instructions since the speech last week.

Lendlease, the company expected to benefit the most out of the HS2 land sale, stressed firmly that its contractual agreements remain in place.

The lack of detail is telling. Because when it does get published there is going to be cause for great shame for the government and all those that backed the HS2 project in its infancy.

If there are just six platforms at Euston station, with HS2 trains running in on existing railway lines, as Mr Sunak has said, then what if any of the major demolition work that has blighted Camden since 2016 was necessary?

Did the hundreds of tenants in three council housing blocks on the Regent’s Park Estate really have to leave?

What about the pupils at the boarded up Maria Fidelis secondary school?

Did the Department for Transport really have to buy Stanley Johnson’s mansion off him for £4.4miillion?

Did the National Temperance Hospital, half of Drummond Street and St James’s Gardens have to be razed?

All those sleepless nights, noise and thundering lorries.

The scandal of Craig Douglas and the Bree Louise pub is just one of hundreds waiting to emerge.