Birmingham City Council was quick to capitalise today on one of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's relatively rare visits to the city to announce the preferred route of High Speed 2, the new rail connection from London to Birmingham and beyond. Council leader Mike Whitby rubbed shoulders with the PM in the middle of Eastside on the proposed site of the new Birmingham High Speed rail terminus and waxed lyrical about the £1.2bn economic impact of high speed rail on the city.
But before anyone gets too excited it is worth remembering that the actual delivery of HS2 will be anything but speedy. According to the government, the first train just might (and that's a fairly hefty maybe) slip into Birmingham in 2026 - that's 17 years away. If that doesn't sound too long, consider where you'll be then. If you're in your early forties and older, with a bit of luck you'll be sunning yourself on your Cote d'Azur yacht and high speed will simply be a measurement of how fast your iced cocktails reach your sun lounger.
Seriously though, the reality is that there is at least one property cycle to go through before HS2 arrives. The publication of the preferred route gives welcome certainty as to where the tracks will go, but of course how committed a future government (of any colour) will be when it comes to shelling out the huge sums involved is far from certain.
So now the ballyhoo about the HS2 announcement is simmering down, perhaps the council can get back to the more immediate business of fast tracking the Big City Plan (see my blogs passim) and working with the private sector to make rapid and real progress on regenerating core parts of Birmingham within the next decade.
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