Overlooking one of Europe’s biggest building sites might not be every luxury apartment dweller’s ideal view, but at least one man is revelling in it.
Below the new 54-storey Icon Tower, Old Oak Common station is starting to take shape: the initial London hub of HS2, and the catalyst for the economic transformation of an unloved part of west London. According to Gary Sacks, the chief executive of the tower’s developer, City & Docklands, this is now “the capital’s new development hotspot”, vindicating the group’s foray west.
While the delays and escalating budget of the high-speed rail project have been well documented, HS2 is keen to show that the story so far – even before any trains run – is not just bat-shed crazy costs, but sky-high benefits from the promise of better transport connections.
New research by consultancy Arcadis, commissioned by HS2 Ltd, claims that the mega-station at Old Oak Common will boost the local economy by £10bn over a decade – and has also turned the area into a new development hotspot for London.
Planning applications within a 1.5-mile radius from the site have risen by 22% since the first phase of HS2 was confirmed in legislation in 2017. That is not an unusual figure for London – but the value of those applications far exceeds comparable areas such as Ealing and Wembley, coming in at a cumulative £3.4bn – more than four times higher than the preceding seven-year period.
Arcadis’s analysis projects that HS2 will help bring 22,000 homes and nearly 19,000 new jobs to the Old Oak Common area, including hi-tech jobs and roles in the creative industries, boosting average pay.
While Euston is planned to succeed Old Oak Common station as HS2’s London terminus, the new west London station, with 14 platforms and fast connections, is likely to be the more impressive hub for many years. As well as HS2, it will boast a stop on the Great Western mainline railway, Heathrow Express, and the Elizabeth line.
HS2’s new chief executive, Mark Wild, has promised to reset the troubled programme, having previously managed Crossrail to a restated timeline and budget to open as the Elizabeth line in 2022.
Wild will unveil Arcadis’s research with a first public speech this week, in an attempt to rekindle enthusiasm in the positive potential of Britain’s biggest infrastructure scheme, which was again criticised last week in a parliamentary report as a “casebook example of how not to run a major project”. The estimated budget for even the truncated HS2 is now as high as £80bn in today’s prices, the public accounts committee said, with huge uncertainty over the fate of Euston at one end and how the railway will accommodate the service on the West Coast mainline north of Birmingham at the other.
Wild said: “HS2 is designed to increase capacity on Britain’s railways and kickstart growth in the British economy. This research shows how HS2 is doing just that – boosting economic prosperity locally around HS2’s Old Oak Common station – years before the first trains leave HS2’s platforms.
“It underlines the vital importance of the work I’m now undertaking to reset HS2 and ensure that this railway is efficiently delivered for the lowest reasonable cost to maximise the benefit to the taxpayer.”
Around Old Oak, Imperial College has snapped up sites including the Victoria Park industrial estate for science and tech developments, while Garden Studios at Park Royal has established a high-end TV production presence since 2021. The studio’s chief executive, Thomas Hoegh, has set out high hopes for it to become the “the media tech village of Europe”, adding: “We see the contours of that today but the reality of that is going to come when HS2 is done.”
Sacks, whose new tower is the tallest residential development in London outside Canary Wharf, believes he is capitalising on new transport connections in the way others already have from the Elizabeth line. While the jury will be out for a long time on the wider cost-benefits of HS2, for him at least: “The returns are going to outweigh the risks by a long way.”
