The deep absurdity of HS2’s diversity agenda

When it comes to British railway history, I can say, without exaggeration, that few places are more iconically located than my own home. This is because I live exactly where Camden Town meets Primrose Hill – and where Britain’s first intercity railway tore through inner London (around 1837), surging out of London’s first mainline station: Euston.

Indeed, my own house is visible in one of the famous 1838 John Cooke Bourne lithographs of this transport revolution: Building Retaining Wall near Park Street. The prosaic title deliberately spars with the poetic grandeur of Bourne’s cityscape, as the Camden Cutting slices grimly through the housing.

I’ve had a splendid view, therefore, of the latest phase of British railway: HS2. And for the last five years or more I have observed, from my desk, as the momentum of this vast project has grown. At first I watched with misgivings (I felt the idea was misconceived; I feared the pollution and disruption).