STATION MODERNISATION
Birmingham ‘will not accept’ basic HS2 station plans
Birmingham City Council’s director of planning and regeneration, Waheed Nazir, was the driving force behind the recent Birmingham Curzon HS2 Masterplan, a grand vision of regeneration, connectivity and architectural inspiration for the city’s east side. RTM spoke to him.
HS2,
which will be the UK’s biggest infrastructure project, involves
a lot of people and affects a lot of people. There are disagreements even among those generally in favour of the new high-speed rail line, including the plans for the planned HS2 terminus in Birmingham city centre at Curzon Street.
The region’s passenger transport executive, Centro, is seeking to lodge a formal appeal against the HS2 Hybrid Bill in its current format, despite being a strong backer of the scheme in principle, because of the impacts the existing proposals will have on integrated transport in Birmingham and the lack of vision regarding connectivity.
Rival schemes?
That is also an issue that animates Waheed 148 | rail technology magazine Apr/May 14
Nazir, director of planning and regeneration at Birmingham City Council, which in February launched a ‘masterplan’ for the Curzon Street station area, including its own designs for the new HS2 station and onward transport options there, ‘rivalling’ the official ones from HS2 and Arup.
Nazir described the existing HS2 station design proposal, as found in HS2’s phase one environmental statement and accompanying transport assessments, as a “very simple box” (below), suggesting that HS2’s base budget “will not have the ability to fund a station with a quality of design that we’re talking about”.
Birmingham “will not accept” that design, he told us, and described plans instead to ‘top up’ HS2’s budget to deliver a new station with locally-raised money from the council, businesses and the local enterprise partnership to achieve a station design of “international standard”.
This is similar to what happened with the New Street station redevelopment, where Network Rail’s early plans were ‘upgraded’ once the city council and John Lewis came on board as partners (RTM explored this arrangement in detail in our February/March 2011 edition).
International ambitions
Discussing the much grander HS2 station design envisioned in the masterplan, created by the head of Nazir’s design team, an architect and urban designer by background, he said:
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