How speed obsession derailed Britain’s biggest infrastructure story
When the history of Britain’s 21st-century infrastructure is written, HS2 will not be remembered as a triumph of engineering, but as a case study in how communications can sink a good idea. It wasn’t just the cost overruns or the political u-turns that killed its reputation – it was the story that was told about it.
For more than a decade, ministers and media alike framed HS2 as a glorified shuttle to London: a faster way for businesspeople to get from Birmingham to Euston. The pitch was speed. The promise was minutes. And the perception – once set – was of a line built for Londoners, by Londoners, to benefit London.
That narrative was not just narrow – it was fatal.
A failure of framing
The clue is in the name. High Speed 2 captured the imagination of Whitehall but alienated the rest of Britain. The emphasis on “speed” distracted from the project’s real economic rationale: capacity.
Britain’s rail network was creaking. By 2009, the West Coast Main Line – Britain’s busiest rail artery – was effectively full. HS2 was never just about getting to London faster; it was about freeing up space on existing lines for freight, local services, and regional connections. Every HS2 train between Manchester Birmingham and London would remove dozens of slower intercity services from the old tracks – allowing better, more frequent trains between Coventry and Wolverhampton, or Stafford and Stoke.
But that was never how it was sold. The glossy launch videos promised “90 minutes to London!” The Treasury briefings boasted about “Britain’s fastest train.” And the public, predictably, concluded that HS2 was a vanity project – an expensive toy for commuters who already had options.
The London zone delusion
Even today, the misunderstanding lingers. At last month’s regional investment summit, West Midlands mayor Richard Parker proudly told investors that HS2 would make Birmingham “about Zone 5 on the Tube map.”
It’s an astonishingly self-defeating soundbite. London’s Zone 5 is suburban – somewhere you commute from, not to. Birmingham isn’t an annex of London. Its economic power lies in being a second city, not a satellite. To sell HS2 as an extension of the Underground is to confirm every criticism ever made of the project: that it exists to pull the regions closer to London’s orbit rather than to strengthen them in their own right.
The mayor’s remark shows just how badly HS2’s communications strategy has warped the narrative. It’s not that the project lacks merit – it’s that its advocates keep explaining it in ways that diminish it.
What HS2 should have meant
The irony is that HS2’s biggest gains were always regional. By shifting long-distance passengers onto a new line, it would have released precious space on existing routes – creating capacity for commuter trains, freight, and inter-regional travel.
That extra capacity could have transformed the Midlands and the North far more than any speed record. Imagine a rail map where Wolverhampton to Birmingham services run every five minutes, or where freight from the Black Country reaches the Humber without clogging passenger lines. That was the promise of HS2 – hidden behind a misplaced obsession with shaving minutes off the London commute.
Cities like Coventry, Derby, Leicester, and Stoke were never going to host HS2 stations. But they were all set to benefit from the extra room on the existing network. A stronger, more balanced Britain could have been the real legacy – if only the story had been told that way.
The communications own goal
The lesson of HS2 is not that big infrastructure is doomed – it’s that storytelling matters. When the message misfires, even the soundest policy becomes indefensible. Ministers sold the dream of a “high-speed train to London.” They should have sold the vision of a high-capacity Britain.
Instead, HS2 became shorthand for everything people think is wrong with Westminster: centralised priorities, southern bias, and expensive vanity. The real benefits – regional resilience, carbon savings, and freight efficiency – were lost in the noise.
Now, with the northern leg scrapped and the London-Birmingham being built at amn ever more delayed pace the country is left with half a project and none of the trust.
In the end, HS2’s biggest failure wasn’t technical or financial – it was communicative. It told the wrong story, to the wrong people, in the wrong way.
And as a result, what should have been a nation-building project became a national punchline.
