Stations unresolved
Former Conservative Transport Minister Steve Norris says the cost-based thinking on a switch from Tooting Broadway to Balham was based on calculations that “were never convincing - a move back to Broadway makes much better sense”.
This is despite Tooting lying on the Wimbledon fault line and sitting on “wet pebbly muck”, according to Crossrail 2 Managing Director Michèle Dix. The extent of this was fully discovered after Transport for London commissioned three boreholes around Tooting Broadway.
Speaking to RAIL in 2016, Dix described Tooting as “the major problem in the whole project… building would be like open heart surgery”.
But a shift away from Balham became evident in a second RAIL interview with Dix in July 2017. “Potential benefits will outweigh the costs… because of the relief it would give to the Northern Line,” she said.
TfL says that since the last public consultation in 2015, when it was predicted that a Tooting Broadway station would cost £ 500 million more than one at Balham, more work has been done to understand the costs and benefits of the dearer option “including minimising impact on Tooting Market and the local community”.
But things have since gone quiet. Mitcham and Morden MP Siobhain McDonagh, who has long campaigned for a station at Tooting Broadway, suspects the Elizabeth Line overspend may be to blame. “I haven’t heard anything more at all,” she tells RAIL.
The question of whether the plan for a station at Kings Road Chelsea is dead or alive still hangs in the air, despite a perception locally that it may have been killed off long ago.
The plan was vehemently opposed by highprofile residents. A spokesman for campaign group nocrossrailchelsea.com told RAIL in 2017 that his sources at City Hall had said Kings Road “isn’t going to happen”.
But when asked, Dix refused to confirm this. She said that despite noisy opposition, there was a quieter ‘yes’ from people who felt that public transport in the area could be better. Also, a business lobby was increasingly in favour.
Norris thinks that taking the line from Victoria to Clapham Junction via a station in King’s Road is “an egregious error”.
“It’s not only unpopular, it fails to identify a station which would create a minimum of 5,000 new jobs or at least an equivalent number of new homes - the pre-conditions for locating any new station,” he says.
“You won’t find a square inch of land where you can build on which you can justify a new station. The argument against King’s Road has been accepted, but no one dare say so.”
Norris says a better option is taking the line from Victoria to Battersea Power Station, linking it with the Northern Line extension (within easy reach of London Overground stations) before proceeding to Clapham Junction.
“The old power station site has thousands of new homes. And there are deprived estates on the other side of Nine Elms Lane that would benefit from a station.”
Almost two years later, everyone’s still in the dark. Asked by RAIL what is the latest it had heard about a King’s Road station, Royal Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council said: “We’re waiting for TfL to make a proposal, and will take a view if and when this happens.”
Norris also has trenchant views about Wimbledon, where C2 plans (including a tunnel) “threaten to devastate the town centre, rather than benefit it”, and where plans to close level crossings north and south would force the need for road diversions.
Local MP Stephen Hammond has long campaigned for a rethink, and has forecast that the tunnel would cause seven years disruption. But while he understands TfL is considering other possibilities, he’s little the wiser about what those are.