LABOUR Party big hitters repeatedly declared the battle for HS2 – a new £50billion railway line from London to Birmingham and cities in the north – to have been won at the party’s annual conference this week.

The triumphant tone over the project – which demands huge demolition in areas around Euston and Regent’s Park – was in marked contrast to last year’s get-together when the entire future of the project seemed up for debate should the party win a majority at May’s general election.

Shadow transport secretary Mary Creagh told a fringe meeting on Monday emphatically: “We are no longer debating the ‘if’ but the ‘when’ and ‘how’.”

These bold and enthusiastic sentiments, however, were not matched among members travelling to Manchester from Camden.

Councillors and members left with a vow to ensure that, if HS2 is built, it will not be at the expense of a swathe of homes and businesses around Euston and Regent’s Park currently facing a date with the bulldozer.

A measure of how enamoured Labour now is of HS2 came on Monday evening at an open meeting hosted by think-tank ResPublica in Manchester’s grand Town Hall building. The audience was invited by the meeting’s chairman, Professor David Begg, pro-HS2 editor of Transport Times, to applaud HS2 architect Lord Andrew Adonis “because he deserves it”. Mr Begg said it was “great” that everybody in the room was supporting HS2, before stopping to check whether everybody was. 

When two people indicated they weren’t, panel speaker Joe Anderson, elected mayor of Liverpool, joked: “Well, you just shut up.” He wants the scheme to be extended to his city.

Lord Adonis told the meeting: “We cannot carry on, the next generation, retrofitting a Victorian railway which is nearly at capacity now, and will be within the next 10 years. We have a massive capacity problem.” He said it was time to link up the “production” with “consumption” across the country. In none of the fringe meetings on HS2 was the complaint from Camden that homes and businesses will be uprooted even discussed.

Ms Creagh, when stopped by the New Journal in a conference hotel corridor, conceded that the situation had to be mitigated for the people of Camden. “The Euston proposals are at a very early stage and it’s important that we have social housing and benefits to the community,” she said.

The fear among Camden campaigners is that to pay for HS2, the redevelopment of Euston Station – itself a £6billion project – will be larger than it needs to be, creating “a Canary Wharf in zone one”, perfect for business rather than the existing community. Big developers have already been sounded out about working on the site.

The discussions at conference, however, moved on to HS3 and where expensive high-speed rail projects should go next.

This meant talk about the London end switched, in the main, to conversations about making it as palatable as possible. 

Holborn and St Pancras MP Frank Dobson has campaigned for the line to end at Old Oak Common, near Wormwood Scrubs, where a new transport hub is planned. He felt Lord Adonis had admitted that would be a better bet for passengers than going to Euston in an article written for Modern Gov magazine, copies of which were circulated in Manchester. Lord Adonis wrote that, by getting off at Old Oak, commuters could get into the City and to Heathrow “in a fraction of the time and with far less congestion than travelling via Euston/King’s Cross/St Pancras and the Victoria, Northern and Circle lines”.

Mr Dobson said: “I saw this magazine and suddenly ‘woohey’, he is conceding the case we’ve always made, that it is better to get off at Old Oak Common.”

A HS2 spokesman said Lord Adonis’s comments did not change the plan to have new developments at both sites.

Camden Council leader Sarah Hayward said: “I still think the case for HS2 as a whole is really shaky. You could spend £50billion on all sorts of things which would have more dramatic improvements to the conditions of people’s lives across the country, such as in infrastructure, house-building, school-building.”

She added: “We’ve always had a twin-track campaign against it – and that includes being against the station scheme at Euston that would demolish homes and rip up businesses. 

“We are not against Euston being redeveloped, but we want it to be redeveloped in the right way. It terrifies me when you hear [HS2 chief executive, Sir] David Higgins being quoted as saying he wants a Canary Wharf in zone one. What we don’t want is a new financial district here which creates a ghost town at night. It would be a disaster.”

Research has shown that it would be quicker for HS2 passengers to get to 94 per cent of Tube stations by getting off at Old Oak Common first, a fact that those calling for a more community-minded blueprint for Euston will now point to.

In November, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee will begin probing all of the financial statements underpinning HS2, including a proposal to spend £6billion on a skyscraper development and new station at Euston.

Mr Dobson said: “I think that is a bad sign for it. I don’t think they would have done an inquiry into it if they didn’t think there was something seriously wrong.”