‘Scrap HS2 immediately!’

• WITH only 12 years left to change our ways and save the world from an environmental catastrophe, it is even more imperative that we start by scrapping HS2 immediately!

Not only Boris Johnson but a vast array of experts, politicians, environmentalists and journalists – as demonstrated in the New Journal – are beginning to realise the extent of its destructive nature, and are, at last, calling for HS2 to be scrapped.

And with over 60 per cent of the public being against it, too, it must be stopped before it causes any more pointless environmental damage to communities and our planet.

Another concern, as you have reported, is Camden Council chiefs wanting to follow in HS2s’ footsteps by indicating that it would leap at the chance to build housing on the sites which have been flattened by HS2. We need our land back that was stolen by HS2, for people to be able to live, breathe and enjoy.

In fact HS2 should be forced to return the land as it was – our public land – parks, and open spaces they land-grabbed, (although they could never replace our beautiful majestic oxygen-giving trees, so mercilessly destroyed in St James Gardens, Euston Square, and woods, forests and eco systems, up and down the country).

They should also rebuild every building they have demolished so far, putting them back as they were, brick by brick by brick (as would normally be the punishment for vandalising heritage buildings). And they should properly compensate all the people whose lives they have totally upturned and ruined.

With much of the current, dangerous, illegal pollution stemming from councils giving unlimited consent to developers for construction work, another case in point of the harm it is causing us, is the extensive construction work being carried out at Parliament Hill and William Ellis Schools in Highgate Road.

No consideration whatsoever is being given to local residents regarding the pollution the building work is causing, which I can smell, mixed with the traffic fumes, as it drifts in and out of my home – even with windows kept tightly shut – on a daily basis.

Or indeed, most importantly, the health and wellbeing of the children being forced to attend the schools at the same time as demolition and construction work is in progress, generating more filthy air for young lungs to ingest, along with the traffic congestion!

I understand that there is no monitoring of pollution levels in place at the schools either. So what’s the point in having a nice new school when it’s likely to hurt or even kill the very pupils it’s being reconstructed for!

Our leaders really need to change their whole outlook on what they consider to be making progress and, instead of taking us back a million paces, I would suggest that they try to adopt some of Helena Norberg-Hodge of Local Futures’s ideas, in order to help create a safer, happy, and healthy environment for humans to survive in, and to save our irreplaceable Earth!

MIMI ROMILLY
Parliament Hill Fields