They make a wasteland and they call it progress on HS2

IF you have occasion to take the Elizabeth line from one of the Ealing stations you will soon pass a large area of London that might come as something of a surprise to you. Old Oak Common is slowly being turned into what the Government likes to call “a new super-hub set to be the best-connected and largest new railway station ever built in the UK”.

- Dylan Jones

It’s almost certainly the biggest building site in Europe, and the first time I saw it it reminded me of Texas. All of it. And not in a good way either. Old Oak Common seems to go on forever; it is so big, it seems, that it can almost certainly be seen from space. Well, it can at the moment, while it is still there.

This bewilderingly labyrinthine monstrosity is meant to be the London hub of the greatest white elephant of our generation: HS2 (a project on which £20 billion has apparently already been spent, with no end in sight). The station will have 14 platforms, a mix of six high-speed and eight conventional service platforms, with an 850 metre-long station box, large enough to fit 6,300 Routemaster buses inside. If you read the hyperbolic PR guff you would think they were building an international space station, not the terminus of the most unwanted, unaffordable, most contested railway line in the country.