Sally Gimson with Councillor Nasrine Djemai at the launch of her new book, Off The Rails

A FORMER councillor has told how she fears for the future of Britain after writing a book on the chaos behind the bungled High Speed 2 railway which has set up decades of demolition and disruption in Camden.

Sally Gimson spoke at the launch of her debut book, Off The Rails, on Thursday evening, explaining how she had travelled the length of the proposed line investigating what went wrong on the project.

The brainchild of Labour peer, Baron Andrew Adonis of Camden Town, HS2 was supported as a flagship infrastructure project by both Conservative and Labour governments.

Ever-spiralling costs eventually led to parts of the proposed line being chopped and for work to stop on the already-flattened land around Euston.

Residents had by then been driven from their homes, while businesses were seized using compulsory purchase orders to make way for the botched project which still is shrouded in uncertainty with no definite completion date and the future of Euston unresolved.

“This is my first book, I’m surprised actually that HS2 has been the start of my journey as an author, but I’m glad it has been,” she said.

“I started writing the book with an agnostic view of HS2 and I still believe in the right kind of high-speed rail linking up the north and making it faster and simpler to travel around the country. I come from Scotland and intercity trains changed my life in the 1980s, but I was astonished at how this megaproject went completely off the rails.”

Ms Gimson was a journalist before she joined the council as a Labour councillor in Highgate ward, eventually promoted to a place on Camden’s cabinet.She unsuccessfully challenged the then leader Sarah Hayward for the top job over the incumbent’s leadership style.

After leaving the council, Ms Gimson was selected to stand for Labour in the safe seat of Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire, only to see her dreams of making it to the House of Commons dashed by a controversial re-run of the selection process.

Work stopped around Euston – after homes and businesses had been knocked down

Friends from her eventful lives in politics and journalism came to support her at the Bloomsbury branch of Waterstone’s – with neither of the main parties at Westminster absolved of blame in her new book.

On HS2’s failure, she told the gathering that problems had included “interference from politicians, the lack of expertise in government and for quite some time nobody appreciated just how complex HS2 was”.

Ms Gimson added: “As I wrote it, I became more and more angry and seriously worried for Britain. If the state is so incompetent, what hope for other infrastructure projects like energy or sewers? Yesterday, I read a piece in the FT about how Sizewell C is so complicated it’s more or less unbuildable.”

Sizewell C is a new nuclear plant planned for the Sufolk coast.

Ms Gimson said she had interviewed countless figures relating to HS2 including those who had “explained the politics of engineering” and others who had lost their homes.

She thanked Baron Mike Katz of Fortune Green, a former transport lobbyist and also once a councillor in Camden, and Nasrine Djemai, a current councillor whose family flat near Regent’s Park was bulldozed due to HS2 works.

Baron Adonis, who holds his title for the Lords despite the lasting hatred for his rail scheme in Camden, has said he has no regrets.

He wrote in Prospect magazine the scheme was not dead and that quicker journey times to Birmingham would one day be celebrated.

“When HS2 opens, I expect it will be greeted as a transport miracle, rather like the first railways and motorways, or more recently the Elizabeth Line in London and high-speed lines around the rest of the world,” he said.

“All of these at the time had critics on grounds of cost and novelty in their generally fraught periods of construction.”