A ‘complete mess’: fury in north London over HS2’s ‘big hole in the ground’

theguardian.com:

Six years after turning the first spade at Euston station, it’s hard for local people to see HS2 as anything other than levelling down.

Hundreds of homes have been demolished. A school, a pub and other businesses have been knocked down or starved of customers. Families have been separated. Now the project has been put on hold and the builders are moving out, leaving a mile-long hole.

Last week, residents of the Camden districts whose lives have been blighted by the construction had their first chance since the announcement to ask HS2 Ltd what happens now.

“They don’t know anything,” said Dorothea Hackman, chair of Camden Civic Society, after a lengthy meeting between residents and HS2 officials last Thursday. “All work has now stopped. It’s a complete mess.”

“There’s a big hole in the ground,” said Danny Beales, Camden council’s cabinet member for housing. “There’s a delay, and uncertainty about if and when works will complete. Can we open up roads? Can we reclaim green space? We need to regenerate the area. It doesn’t seem like there’s much certainty about that, or money.”

Since the announcement by transport secretary Mark Harper on 9 March that HS2 would be delayed by two years due to rising costs, hundreds of workers at Euston have been redeployed or face redundancy. Their custom had kept many businesses near the station afloat after six years of disruption, noise and dust, Beales said, describing the situation as a way to “degenerate” the area.

Harper said the £109bn high speed line linking Birmingham to London would end at Old Oak Common, a sprawling depot in west London with neither oaks nor common land that is being turned into a station. It would not be linked to Euston until 2041.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said