Drummond Street blocking station permeability 

• ADRIAN Betham was correct in his letter, (It really is an HS2 land-grab, September 1).

HS2’s compulsory purchase of the homes and parks in west Euston will enable the profit from selling the over-station development rights to Lendlease, for skyscrapers to fund the rail project.

HS2’s new station design (published earlier this year) will potentially enable Lendlease to cash in on their investment well before the station is complete.

For, in response to the Oakervee Inquiry’s rejection of the previous design as unintegrated and unviable, HS2’s new design proposes to carry out the previously two-stage construction work in one stage.

Notably this permits “top-down construction” whereby potentially the office city on the roof of the station’s shopping mall can be completed while the underground platforms (and their massive services basement below) are being excavated.

Drummond Street: double-deck down 

Undoubtedly the cost of this intensification to Camden will be increased construction impact, for example, construction traffic etc.

Mr Bethan’s alternative of building the HS2 station over the existing station to avoid the land-grab was never feasible.

Apart from imponderable safety issues, the two stations don’t fit and the HS2 tracks would require a viaduct through Camden.

And the west Euston “land” is now “grabbed”. But HS2’s new design makes a different double-deck station viable.

This alternative design rebuilds the Network Rail station over the HS2 platforms and releases the sad existing station site for redevelopment as a new district in Camden with streets to permit reinstatement of even more homes and green spaces than have been destroyed, as well as office development.

And this “double-deck down” design once had Camden support. In her introduction to the Euston Area Plan the then council leader, Sarah Hayward, advocated such a “double-deck down station” for consideration as an alternative to HS2’s land-grabbing design.

This Camden support however was short-lived because, in exchange for a seat on HS2’s Euston strategic board, the government insisted that Camden should drop their call for an investigation of this more beneficial station design option and instead fully support HS2’s design.

The new HS2 station plans were published earlier this year… but the required integration with the existing station and Lendlease’s masterplan is still unresolved.

So there is currently a window of opportunity to rebuild the Network Rail station over the HS2 station as an integrated passenger terminus and then redevelop the sad 1960s station (designed originally as a freight terminal).

This was explored four years ago by an international town planning summer school which designed a masterplan around a “double-deck down” HS2 station and concluded that only this approach can deliver Camden’s Euston Area Plan including true permeability via real streets (rather than HS2’s pathetic rooftop walkway).

The only drawback of this alternative masterplan is judged to be cash flow. That is, Lendlease won’t get the greater return from the existing station site until project completion.

So it is excluded from the government’s strategic oversight and doesn’t figure in Lendlease’s ongoing consultation about masterplan options.

JEFF TRAVERS,
Euston Design