Recently in Transport infrastructure Category

It is a serious period of transition for me as we gear up to go on site with the first UKR pilot.  I am clearing the decks.  This week I chaired my final meeting of the South Kilburn Neighbourhood Trust, after nearly five years during which it has been my honour and privilege to serve that fine community.  

And, though I say so myself, I think I leave SK in pretty good shape.  And in pretty safe hands. With the amount of visible progress being made, South Kilburn is seriously becoming a "good news" story: multiple cranes can be seen swinging into action every morning and we have nothing short of a phoenix rising from the ashes of a crumbling 1960s council estate, with the decant programme now significantly underway, under the stewardship of the London Borough of Brent, as master developer and landowner.

Further to last Wednesday's blog (and I must apologise for the increasingly rabid nature of these postings, but spare a thought for me sometimes - it really is wearing being this incandescent with rage the whole time).

Dr Evans and Twitter drew my attention to the truly excellent definition of the Thames Gateway to be found in the UKR Regeneration Dictionary, viz: The Thames Gateway "A slightly silly name (how can a gateway be 40 miles long?) for a blameless and still largely unknown part of the South East where the standard of living is shockingly below the rest of the region for a surprisingly large proportion of the 1.5m population, and which, with thoughtful long-term planning and investment could become a much better and more attractive place to live and relieve the development pressure on other more congested locations elsewhere; but which had the misfortune to become a focus of government action, and a battleground between ill-informed brownfield romantics, development fetishists, regeneration fantasists and disaster junkies."

Nipped up to Luton on Tuesday. I can seriously say "nipped" as my nearest tube from work is Farringdon and it can't have taken more than 25 minutes.

Inspired by this experience, I intended to start writing about what an understated triumph the Thameslink is (my theme was going to be: just WHAT else could we manage to achieve by utilising existing bits of railway kit ?)

However, this argument has been somewhat undermined by hearing this morning that only 50% of the service is running due to a work-to-rule by the drivers (btw it was ME who started talking about a "Winter of Discontent" long before all the papers - I was out of the traps on this on 12th August, just so's you know, the Sunday Times didn't catch up until the weekend before last. So ner).

I had been invited to Luton to do a double header with that well-known accomplished pugilist Dr Tim Williams for an organisation called MKSM, ably led by the hugely accomplished public servant, Hilary Chipping (who I first knew when she was at the Highways Agency; nice to see her in such a positive billet these days. Nice also to see Ben Stoneham, last seen at the CLG Thames Gateway Unit, a very fine public servant).

MKSM stands for Milton Keynes South Midlands and, as one delegate explained to me, the guys (an agglomeration of local councils and regeneration agencies involved in the MKSM partnership) hope to find a more comfortable fit for the future of this particular growth zone as "South Midlands" rather than, as hitherto, the queasy accommodation of folding them all into the so-called "South East". (Now while this feels right, this stuff is never easy. I have learnt from bitter experience the potential to waste huge amounts of energy arguing about demarcation and territory).