Marples and Beeching

I disagree, because my observation of the WCML is that it's biggest single problem is that it is trying to cover too many bases - freight, local passenger, intercity passenger. The capacity killer on a railway is having too many different types of train running.
By both offering higher speed travel and pulling those fast trains off the network to allow a more normalised use, the benefits from change are maximised.

My problem with the HS2 project, even accepting that there is a risk of further pull towards London from the main trunk, is that it has insufficient emphasis on non-London centric travel. I don't sense the appetite or desire for acceleration of the much slower inter-urban services that can relieve so much of the congestion in the north and midlands.

 

Mine too, though I'd add concern for everything, by way of housing, infrastructure and employment to support said traffic.

 

As indeed their grand fathers or great grandfathers had to create those towns and villages in the first place.

 

Quite so. Perhaps unfairly, I often get the feeling that rather too many have come to regard the present as a some uniquely immutable status quo, with change neither desirable nor necessary.

 

But the Tim Dunn programme, an excellent detective story, is about the 1970-72 period. The background to that is that the 1968 Act model of a commercial railway plus public subsidy for socially necessary routes was already in a lot of trouble. The numbers just didn't add up. What to do? That's the background to the secret policy review and its leaking which is the story of the programme.

It's a very good listen (link in post 180 above), but I don't agree with the conclusion that Reg Dawson and Richard Hope saved 7000 miles of railway. For one thing, a very similar exercise, the Serpell Report a decade later, did not survive political and public scrutiny. For another, John Peyton, Minister of Transport and MP for Yeovil (lines to be closed) was a wily old bird. For another, the Govt only lasted until Feb 74, when we saw that the Labour policy (in the 74 Railways Act) was the blanket funding of the railway and its services as it was, pretty much in toto.

 

Well quite, but if that shifting status quo also included a much lower need for commuting and associated transport; and a concomitant shift in city centre land use away from commercial property and back towards domestic, I wouldn't see that as an altogether bad thing!

Tom

 

I also liked the programme and found it interesting, though I do also think @timmydunn overstates it somewhat, but am less dismissive of the claim. In particular, Hope and Dawson achieved their impact before the government had a policy that they were invested in and would struggle to row back on - I suspect that if the proposed policy had matured to be government policy, there would have been closures aplenty. And, even if that plan would never have seen the light of day, its destruction provided a pattern for the dismantling of Serpell a decade later.

 

Yes, I enjoyed the programme too & I agree with you that the leaking of the report did not save 7000 miles of railway as the BBC would have us believe. What the programme did highlight was the strength of the anti-rail attitude amongst many of the Department's civil servants & the lengths (some illegal) to which the Civil Service & police went to track down the leaker of the report. During the programme the politicians hardly got a mention (as I recall). In fact the initial conspiratorial meeting at which Reg Dawson (then head of the Railway Division) was present was in the spring of 1970 - a time when Labour were still in power. Those present were told that official policy was to be ignored, politicians must not learn of the meeting, & no notes were to be taken (an instruction Dawson ignored). The opinion of many present was that 'financial support of the railways was a waste of money & much more of the network should be closed down'. The report later written which Dawson (by then moved away from the Rly Div because of his pro-rail views) accidently stumbled across in 1972 & subsequently leaked, listed closures which Lord Faulker said 'would have decimated the system'. In fact the resume of closures that Faulkner described was very much the same as those that were 'not for development' in Beeching's second report (& which I listed) - which made me immediately wonder whether that had been the starting point for the civil servants planning.

 

Absofrigginlutely. I remember as sprog, on of my occasional weekend journeys up to London with my father was diverted to Cannon Street (Charing X was closed due to Hungerford Bridge being under repair IIRC). The contrast with the bustle of Trafalgar Sq on a Saturday couldn't have been greater, with 'The City' being a veritable ghost town at weekends back then.

Electric vehicles of course mean busy town and city centres will be cleaner (and residents of Brighton's Viaduct Road and Pollution Circus will be able to open their windows (and wash 'em too!), but the lack of noise, barring some synthesised whine, will take some getting used to. Overall, it bodes well for bringing such areas back to life.

As the number of shops able to survive onlineisation (if decarbonisation is a word, so's that, so there!) settles out, there is bound to be substantial increase in currently commercial premises switching (or reverting) to residential use.

 

I think your first and third paragraphs rather contradict your second. It is the commercial activity that helps bring those areas to life - hence the scorn placed on dormitory towns.

 

And it's that very commercial activity which, due to changes in shopping patterns, which is dying a death in towns everywhere.

First it was out of town stores, now online shopping is rendering obsolete much beyond food retail, coffee shops, hairdressers, fitness centres (the latest fad) and nail bars. Even charity shops and newsagents are increasingly giving up the ghost.

Someone needs to get into town more often!

 

I agree - and share your view of out of town shopping. But converting those areas to residential may be the right thing to do, but it won't bring them back to life - certainly not as they used to be.

 

Certainly true, though the possibilities for former shopping areas, sympathetically renovated for their new life, I find more exciting a prospect than not. Consider, in older towns and cities, generally we're speaking of more generous proportions than residential side streets and in places which "benefitted" from the architecture of the 1960-90s, those vast, too often bleak and soulless pedestrianised areas might finally erupt into life. We can but hope so.

 

Probably right--- anyway even today it is not very difficult to work out the best half of the network!

I think it is true that the systemic crisis was in the early 70s. Since then the reality has been that it is impossible to close a single inch of the network irrespective of the economics. Filey Holiday Camp station goes down in history. One train a week calls at Denton. Sometime in the early 70s, middle Britain woke up and said 'enough is enough'. Did Dawson and Hope provide the space for that debate to happen en clair? For sure. Did the leak change the ultimate outcome? Not so sure.

 

But the case of London commuting disproves that. Whilst accepting that the move will be from Little Snoring to Metrocity FOR WORK, the worker will add travel cost to housing cost to establish permanent residence. As Metrocity housing costs rise the workers will seek longer distances from Metrocity to establish both permanent residence and a pattern of commuting. That has been noted in Scotland where the rising cost of housing in Edinburgh (noted by my cousin last week to be unaffordable to many) has led to the success of the Waverley route and the Fife Circle as serving areas with low-cost housing whereby cheaper accommodation plus travel cost remains cheaper than housing within Edinburgh.

 

I think you make Tom’s point, though - people live outside the centres, but the jobs are actually found in them. That doesn’t always translate to expenditure where people live - especially not in the sort of (pre Covid) ecosystem of small businesses supporting offices, factories, etc.

Where I disagree with @Jamessquared is in the assumption that it’s a one way traffic. The analysis may show historic trends, but we’ve seen the dangers of such analysis these last couple of years!

My own view is that the costs of London are rising to the point where market pressures are going to drive demand and therefore supply elsewhere. That is where having large cities at day trip distance is to their benefit, as the burden of travelling falls.


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For better or worse, London is uniquely affected by any number of factors absent elsewhere. Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stanstead airports aside, it'd be interesting to learn how many living within 'The Dread Sigil Odegra"* (or M25, if you prefer) rarely, if ever venture into the wider UK.

I'd be more than slightly wary of any predictions in regard of future trends in demographics, as so many major factors we've historically 'taken as read' are in a state of flux, to a degree no-one now living has experienced. Those factors are ones we might regard as both negative and positive, driven by any number of considerations, some fairly obvious, others entirely novel.


* No? Google it.

 

Given the number of people within the M25 are effectively migrant workers from the rest of the UK, I suspect that the answer is very different to what you may think. Listen to the accents in town and there are plenty of "non-Londoners" in London

 

I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s read “Good Omens”!

On London being “special”, I agree. But that doesn’t mean that it’s immune from the laws of supply and demand, or that it’s advantages are permanent and unchallengeable.

If you combine the excessive house prices in London*, improved physical connectivity, and modern communications, the inherent advantages of London are much weaker than they were.

The implication of that is that other centres may be able to compete more readily, and therefore that the historically informed assumptions around the analysis suggesting that HS2 will draw activity into London are debatable.

* - I grew up in Southfields. My parents bought their house (a 3 bed terrace built at the turn of the century) in the mid 70s on a policeman’s wage, I believe discounted a bit as a doer upper. As a child, I remember neighbours whose parents had bought their properties new. The idea of a policeman being able to afford to purchase a house in the area now is fanciful at best, as a search on Rightmove suggests that all houses in the area are going for £1m+. Prices at that level will force people out, and help provide critical mass elsewhere.


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Absolutely agree with your first paragraph. Even if the WCML was actually a decent line, why wouldn't you put a high speed link between the country's two largest cities? In fact it isn't a decent line. Firstly it was built like a dog's hind leg, so Inter City 125s were speeding up the east coast and out to the west while the WCML had to wait for tilting trains that actually worked. Secondly, the line had never been doubled between Rugby and Birmingham, so your high speed Pendolino is held up by the local stopping service and the freight. That's before you get to the bottle neck of the approach to New Street via Proof House Junction.