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All aboard for a trip to the future
• FOR those of us in the Lib Dems who have been campaigning for Crossrail and other transport links for London and Islington for longer than I care to recall, the news that Crossrail has finally got the go-ahead was met with a sigh of relief.
That it has taken so long for this much-needed addition to London’s transport infrastructure to be approved has been the cause of much frustration, especially as most agree it is necessary and will bring valuable benefits for all who use London’s Underground. The only pity is that it will just be breaking ground as the London Olympics take place.
This engineering undertaking is going to be a huge project, crossing as it will the most tunnelled ground in the world. If £16 billion sounds like a lot of money, the cost to London and the British economy will be far greater if projects such as Crossrail are not built, as most experts agree that to do nothing will result in London gridlocking quite possibly as early as 2015, some say sooner.
Crossrail will give a fast direct line to Heathrow Airport from the centre of London, direct access for the eastern and western suburbs to the City, Canary Wharf and the West End and relieve pressure on the Underground network.
It is also great news for Islington. Crossrail, together with the announcement on funding for the required work for Thameslink approved in July (£3.5 billion at current nominal prices) will allow the development around Farringdon Station, which is destined to become an important interchange, to finally become a reality.
And the good news for Islington does not end there. Very shortly, on November 11, Transport for London (TfL) will take over operation of several suburban rail services around the periphery of central London, turning them into a unified North London Railway – “The Overground” – and bringing benefits of more frequent trains, integration into the Oyster card system and station refurbishment to Underground standard, with its associated CCTV, security and train information, to those who use the old North London line and the Gospel Oak-Barking railway.
Passengers from Crouch End, Upper Holloway, Highbury and Islington, Barnsbury and Caledonian and Canonbury should start to see the benefits quite soon.
In the same year that work is expected to commence on Crossrail, and as a result of much hard lobbying by us, the extended East London Railway is scheduled to arrive at Highbury and Islington and at Caledonian and Barnsbury.
It is hoped these two lines will result in an orbital service being built encircling the capital.
The new network will provide better services through the city’s suburbs and take more pressure of the overburdened Underground.
We also hope that, with the arrival of the East London Railway, some of the bus routes through the borough can be rationalised to relieve pressure on our already-overburdened roads.
On our boundaries, and with their offices in Islington, Eurostar services will start to run on November 14, from what is promising to be a spectacularly refurbished St Pancras International Station, with its associated shopping and hotel and a truly awe-inspiring original glass platform roof. Paris will be only two hours 15 minutes away, and Brussels just an hour and 51 minutes.
It is an exciting time, with Islington sitting at the centre of all these new projects.
As for the future? TfL announced in November last year, in its Transport 2025 document, a proposal for a Chelsea-Hackney line, which would link Angel and Essex Road with Wimbledon and Epping.
Time will tell, but we Lib Dems will continue to lobby for a green, integrated transport system for the borough, and there is no doubt railways will play an important part.
Cllr Stefan Kasprzyk
Lib Dem lead member for integrated transport
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