When it comes to British railway history, I can say, without exaggeration, that few places are more iconically located than my own home. This is because I live exactly where Camden Town meets Primrose Hill – and where Britain’s first intercity railway tore through inner London (around 1837), surging out of London’s first mainline station: Euston.
Indeed, my own house is visible in one of the famous 1838 John Cooke Bourne lithographs of this transport revolution: Building Retaining Wall near Park Street. The prosaic title deliberately spars with the poetic grandeur of Bourne’s cityscape, as the Camden Cutting slices grimly through the housing.
Does any of this bizarre, sometimes-well-meaning nonsense really matter?
I’ve had a splendid view, therefore, of the latest phase of British railway: HS2. And for the last five years or more I have observed, from my desk, as the momentum of this vast project has grown. At first I watched with misgivings (I felt the idea was misconceived; I feared the pollution and disruption). Then I watched with growing fascination as the workers toiled all day and night – sometimes under dazzling, stark, Carravagian floodlights – prepping the Victorian line for 21st century rail, and repeating the John Cooke Bourne moment in the very same spot where intercity railways were born.
And now, of course, I am staring at all this with a whole new mood, one of horrified bemusement, as this shuddering juggernaut comes grinding to a halt. The rumours are that the Euston section of HS2 might be totally abandoned, leaving behind ‘houses knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up’ (that’s Dickens, describing the Euston railworks, in Dombey and Son) – yet with no actual railway to show for it.
How has it come to this? How have we, potentially, as a nation, made such an expensive, monumental mess? For a partial answer, I just have to drop my gaze from my windows, and look at my laptop, and open one of the most baroque documents I have ever encountered: the 52-page epic that is HS2’s latest annual Equality, Diversity and Inclusion statement (by contrast, HS2 produced, at the same time, a mere 12-page document dedicated to ‘tunnelling costs’).
This remarkable work begins with an earnest prologue from one ‘Dame Judith Hackett, DBE, FREng, FIChemE, FCGI, Non-Executive Director and Board Champion for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’, who practically manages to cover two pages with just her name and title.
With that out of the way, the documents dives deep. Very deep. Much of it is dedicated to eagerly telling us exactly how many white men they have excluded – sorry, how many more women and ethnically, sexually and religiously diverse people they have employed, promoted, or used as suppliers.
Ms Hackett herself tells us that ‘this year we have seen ever greater workforce diversity in the Tier 1 supply chain’. On page 3, the statement lets us know that ’40 per cent of the HS2 Ltd Executive Leadership Team’ is female. On page 12 it says ‘we have set a challenging corporate target of 23 per cent for ethnic diversity’, on page 15 we learn that HS2 people say ‘Ramadan Mubarak’, and a few pages later it goes into such depth we are told that 0.5 per cent of HS2 workers are Buddhist.
And it continues. Page 5 reassures us that there is ‘an EDI goal in all staff annual objectives, with a bespoke library of goals for our ELT and our SLT focused on championing inclusivity and challenging bias’. On page 6 we are educated that ‘each year HS2 runs a structured reverse mentoring programme where we pair all our SLT members with a reverse mentor’. Yes, who needs an actual train when you’ve got a reverse mentor?
On page 7, Emma Head informs us that ‘we delivered an inclusive leadership workshop for our top sixty technical leaders’. By page 12 we likewise discover that HS2 has been ‘delivering training sessions on conscious inclusion and understanding bullying and harassment to help facilitate internal conversation and greater understanding of unconscious bias’, which sounds like it takes up an awful lot of time which might be better spent, I dunno, building railways?
There is plenty more. Page 23 assures us that HS2’s award winning Race Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage Network has continued to ‘grow its membership at pace’ by ensuring awareness, right along the HS2 route, of Race Equality Week, South Asian Heritage Month, National Inclusion Week, Black History Month, National Day of Staff Networks, and Stephen Lawrence Day.
A few lines later we are told that the Onboard Network has sent mail-outs, created information sheets and organised events so as to enable all HS2 workers to celebrate important dates like: International Non-Binary People’s Day, Bi-Visibility Week, International Drag Day, Trans Awareness Week, International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, and the International Transgender Day of Visibility.
Nor have they forgotten HS2 railway workers who are so exhausted by all this they have gone off having sex – or building railways. The Onboard Network also creates info sheets and offers events surrounding International Asexuality Day.
Within this sea of inanity, one set of stats is particularly enticing, and deserves focus. On page 18 the HS2 document assesses, in morbid detail, the sexual orientation of its workers. For instance, while we learn that only 4 per cent of HS2 workers are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or questioning, it is also good to know that at least 8 per cent of ‘phase 2 HS2 directors’ are on the LGBTQ+ rainbow.
Of course, it’s all absurd. But does any of this bizarre, sometimes-well-meaning nonsense really matter? As I look up from my laptop, and gaze out at the vista that is Euston, where the busy and innocent workers in their hi-viz jackets are once more ascending the lofty cranes, I rather think it does.
Alongside the various sections devoted to Nimbyism, corruption, political incompetence, and national intention tremor, when they come to do the analysis of where HS2 went wrong (and in China they already use Britain as a teachable moment of how not to do infrastructure), there must be at least one chapter on how Isambard Kingdom Brunel somehow managed to build the Great Western Railway without knowing whether his navvies were bi-curious Sikh furries, yet we are apparently incapable of the same. Because we have created vast, crazy, self-enhancing and Kafka-esque bureaucracies dedicated to ensuring that the ridiculous bureaucrats get paid long before anything gets built.
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