Ringing the changes with new vision of a high-speed future for UK
Dec 16 2010 The Journal
High-speed rail has the potential to benefit the economies of cities across the UK, but the proposed route is premised on a misleading and very London-centric view, argues MICHAEL BELL
AFTER decades of talk and hopes that it would bring prosperity to the North, it now seems that a high-speed north-south railway will be built. It can’t be started before 2017 because Crossrail in London comes first and the financial crisis is causing further delay, but the thinking and planning starts early next year. It is important to think hard to ensure we get it right.
We should remember what Ernest J Simmons wrote in 1879 in his ‘Memoirs of a station master’: “The Fame [Thame] people clamoured loudly for the new line to be opened to Snorum [Oxford], which expected event was to be an immense boon, but which has, in reality, worked against them by bringing the trade of the town into competition with that of a much larger one, and by affording means of escape for commercial travellers and others who were obliged in the old days to spend the night. Railways drain small towns and feed large ones.”
We have got so used to seeing maps like that pictured opposite – the Farm Track Layout – that they have come to look reasonable. But look again; it connects all cities to London, but none of them to each other. The thinking behind it might have been to drain everything to London (Simmons’ “larger city” in this case) because that’s the way you lay out the tracks on a farm. There is no value in bringing the hay to the cornfield nor the cows to the potato field; all must be brought to the farmhouse, London, to have value. Traffic between provincial centres is not to be encouraged! But it may not be a result of calculation, it may be due to London-limited childishness.
In their report “High Speed Rail”, High Speed 2 (HS2) – the company set up by the Government to consider the case for new high-speed rail services between London and Scotland – presents the graphic shown below with very little discussion. It shows the relationship between the productivity of a city or region (measured by its gross value added) and the travelling time by rail from London.
A best fit line has been drawn through it, which has a slope of £5,000/head/year/hour’s travelling time from London. But notice a curious feature: the slope is largely about the fortunes of the small places, the places which might be connected to a high-speed line if they were on its route.
The big centres, the places which must be the main objectives of a high-speed network – Tyne and Wear, West Yorkshire, Manchester, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands – are all on very nearly the same level, £17,500. They have widely different travelling times from London, but that has had no effect on their economic performance. That can only be because their economies are largely independent of the London economy.
And why is London so prosperous? Not because it has stolen from the North or served it or even traded with the North very much. It does business mostly within itself. It is prosperous because it’s big and can do business within itself. The new railway can bind together the North and make it big and prosperous too.
The Labour government commissioned the consultants HS2 to design in detail a route from London to Birmingham, and to sketch out how to extend the route northwards.
HS2 sketched out a route to Manchester and beyond to Glasgow, fairly straightforward, and north-eastwards to the east Pennine chain of towns and further north to Newcastle and Edinburgh, which is less straightforward. They called the complete route the “Y-shaped route”.
But it is silly to build TWO high speed routes to Scotland, one along the east coast and one along the west coast, both 200 miles long, so as to avoid building 50 miles of route to join Glasgow and Edinburgh, and another 50 miles to connect Manchester and Leeds. Three trains an hour cross the border at the east and three at the west. We cannot build a high speed line for three trains an hour, but we can for six. That one route should go along the east coast because it would serve and join together the important Tyne-Wear and Tees conurbations.
The Tory government commissioned HS2 to design a route going on from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds. This is called the “Reverse S route” because it takes up a thought, known to planners since at least the 1950s, that the two furthest apart big cities of this country are London and Glasgow; the distance between them is 410 miles. But by going Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, London increases the distance by less than a quarter to 510 miles and reaches 26 million people – 47% of the UK population.
Obviously this is the unspoken long-term plan. But it leaves out the important east Pennine towns Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester and Coventry.
I hold that HS2 stuck too close to Labour’s instructions. They should not have aimed their route to Birmingham, but 15kms to the east, to go to Birmingham through Coventry. A fork in the route just east of Coventry would give access to Leicester, Nottingham, etc. over many existing or abandoned routes.
A chord at that junction joining Leicester to Coventry creates a whole new possibility, a ring-city, which I would call Ringby, consisting of the ring Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester and back to Coventry. At the speeds which HS2 plan, travelling times around it would be half to three quarters of an hour. Those are the travelling times around London which make London a “single city” and will make Ringby a single city.
It is not a new idea: for the same reasons Dutch geographers see the circle of cities Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht as one city – Randstad (“Rim City”) – stressing that it is a ring with no centre. As a whole it the is chief city of the Netherlands. Ringby can be the central city of Britain.
Millions will no longer be living in an “outlying city”, they will be living in a metropolis with all the vigour that can bring. It will become a very important city, and nearer to Newcastle than London, whose people are notoriously unwilling to travel north.
I call this route “the þ-shaped route”. Hull and Liverpool can be served by offshoots, so serving all the large centres of population east of the Severn. It serves the maximum population for the least new route mileage.
What objections can there be to Ringby? London-firsters will say: “This country needs a strong centre”. This is ignorant; Germany divides its capital city functions among five centres: Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfürt and München and Germany is a more prosperous country because all of it is looked after by the regional capital.
It also shows spite, it is saying that London would rather be the rich capital of a poor country than the even richer capital of a rich country.
Michael Bell is a rail enthusiast from the North East. He recently presented a version of this article to the Stephenson Locomotive Society
