RailFreight.com UK Editor Simon Walton has a cautious welcome for a government policy to build 1,5 million new homes. Many of those dwellings will be built on land formerly used by the railway network. However, he says that building alongside the railway is good, but building on the railway is bad. It risks repeating mistakes that still hamper properly planned development today.
The announcement came from not one, but two government ministries. The Department for Transport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government collaborated on a press event that proclaimed a new plan to solve the UK housing crisis. Newsflash: there is always a housing crisis in the UK.
Once again, and after decades of prevaricating, the latest government has pledged (just like all the other governments) to solve the “housing crisis” at a stroke. This time, however, the politicians say it will be different. This time, it will invest in remediating “brownfield sites” (former industrial land) and not concrete over the green and pleasant parts of this green and pleasant land.
Citizens and railways have seen it all before
For those of us with an interest in another sort of development, that promise did not only ring hollow, it rang an alarm bell. When looking for urban development opportunities, local and national governments have readily turned to the railways as an easy hit.
National policy swept away city-centre goods operations, and left local authorities scrambling to turn what would be today’s ideal logistics hubs into homogenous “city centre renewal” projects that are now the decaying monuments to short-term philosophy.
Chosen example in Manchester
No surprise that concerns were raised when the chosen example of this latest “inner city” brownfield revolution was the site of Manchester’s Mayfield Terminus. Mayfield has not been on the railway map for decades, but that doesn’t mean it’s out of sight and forgotten.
Anyone working on or using the railways through central Manchester is all too familiar with the decaying structure. It lies directly adjacent to the hugely overcrowded platforms of Piccadilly Station (it actually closed while that station was still known as London Road). For freight drivers, the once busy terminus is a particularly poignant sight – and site.
Railways leading their own erasure
The loss of Mayfield – under a proposed high-rise and so-called “luxury” apartment development, pretty much puts the last nail in any lingering hope that Manchester’s notorious Castlefield Corridor may, one day, get the extra tracks it so desperately needs. That ambitious railway proposal may be a pipe dream, but it will be permanently extinguished once the developers’ sales offices open, sitting on the very platforms where once passengers and parcels rolled into the city centre, and might even have seen HS2 trains one day.
The very fact that the UK government has called upon two railway organisations to spearhead its housing programme gives as clear a signal as could be, to say that Britain’s rationalised railway infrastructure can expect to be permanently constrained by houses and apartments, newly built and blocking railways forever.
Illiterate planning behind an illiterate facade
Platform4 – a stylish amalgamation of words and figures – is the illiterate name given to a new development body that similarly joins without a space the property management arms of the national rail infrastructure agency Network Rail and London and Continental Railways Ltd, the independent body, once set up to manage property matters for the route built to carry Eurostar (and the occasional international freight train) from the Channel Tunnel to London.
Now, of course, there is a great deal of merit in building homes close to corridors of communication, and a railway is preferable to having a roaring motorway at the bottom of a suburban garden. Look only at the grand Georgian and Victorian cities of the UK, and you will easily find rows of fine townhouses enplaned like Bath, Edinburgh, and London, where the railway was a welcome neighbour, and often the reason for the houses to be built in the first place.
Foolishly building on the line
Today’s solution is, however, completely the opposite. Rather than building adjacent to the railways, many sites are being singled out because they once were railway land – be that thin ribbons of railway lines long gone, or sprawling sites that were laid with a fan of sidings. While the railway industry welcomes the opportunities presented by the new building policy, there are decades of railway reversals to be addressed.
The likelihood is that rail freight will see a substantial portion of the work required to get raw building materials from the quarries of England to the housing estates of the future. It’s all very well praising the business opportunities that a building boom presents. However, if the boom involves building on the very land that railways occupy, then that welcome is something of a Trojan horse.
Waverley Route homes from homes
There are people of pensionable age living in houses that were built on land that was once a railway. An irony of that situation is exemplified in the building of the Borders Railway in Scotland, a line on the cusp of its tenth anniversary. There are many examples of how shortsighted development added to the cost of reopening the line. Examples include the building of a busy highway (the Edinburgh City Bypass) over the trackbed and the building of social housing on the tracks at a community in Midlothian.
There was even planning permission granted for a private house directly in the middle of the tracks in a rural community in the Borders. In Galashiels, the biggest intermediate town on the line, not one but two huge supermarkets are built on the line (allowing only a single track to squeeze between a cliffside and the checkouts). In a supreme act of ironic civic myopia, a short-sighted (or perhaps well-rewarded) local planning department officer signed off permission to build an entire housing estate on the solum of a once busy branch of the line. To then call the development “Waverley Court” still leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of those old enough to remember the original promotional marketing of “The Waverley Route”.
Hidden costs make rails even more expensive
It is beyond contempt to argue against the building of enough houses for the growing population of Britain. However, it is entirely reasonable – and required – to question the details of a policy that makes the complementary development of the railway very much harder (and more expensive). Houses alone are not the answer to rebuilding our green and pleasant land.
The amenities and the communication needs to be provided for as well, unless new are to seed a repeat of the 1960s – and a whole new generations of urban wateslands, connected by nothing more than a car journey to yet more outer urban shopping malls, or a fleet of delivery vans, shuttling back and forth from those same malls.
Before levelling the ground, perhaps those earthmoving machines should be used to level the playing field, and give true consideration to including rails along with homes.