South Cheshire business bosses have welcomed a Government announcement that Crewe will have an HS2 link and hub station open in 12 years, writes Kirsty Rollings.
The decision could create quarter of a trillion pound growth in the area’s economy, according to Cheshire East Council Leader Cllr Michael Jones.
George Osborne has revealed that the finalised high-speed route will include Crewe as the Northern Superhub.
Crewe’s new station is now expected to be built and operational by 2027, six years earlier than originally anticipated.
Christine Gaskell, chairman of Cheshire and Warrington Local Enterprise Partnership, said: “I am absolutely ecstatic.
“It’s brilliant news – not only for Crewe, but also for South Cheshire, for North Staffordshire and the wider Cheshire and Warrington business community.
“We recently signed an agreement with North Staffs to look at opportunities around junction 16.
“We believe that the next 25 years we will generate a 100,000 news homes and a 125,000 new jobs just around South Cheshire and North Staffs.
“We’ve always talked about Crewe being this high speed city, but what we believe is a lot of the Cheshire market towns such as Winsford will grow, too.
“Businesses will say ‘Cheshire is a fantastic place to live, great place work and it’s a great place to do business’.
“Suddenly, all these distances are not that far and so people and businesses will start to take advantage of it.”
With the HS2 in place, journey time from Crewe to London will take just 55 minutes – 35 minutes less than the current fastest rail journey.
South Cheshire College Student Alex Hassall, from Shavington, said: “These are exciting times for people in this area as they can see work coming to the area.
“Not just for my generation, but for my children and their children and so on.”
Cllr Jones told Nantwichnews: “This is absolutely huge for the area.
“From Stoke all the way through, it’s a situation where there’s a quarter of a trillion pound growth in the economy over the next 25 years.
“This is costing £5 billion to connect and we are going get back potentially a quarter of a trillion pounds, potentially 10 billion pounds a year.
“The impact is to give that money to everybody to improve the quality of life, better jobs, better school, better leisure facilities more doctors appointments.”
(words and pictures by Kirsty Rollings)
Instead of a station at Basford which is far from the town centre, the college and the MMU site, not to mention the business park & industrial estate use the existing (little used and could be closed and re designed) freight tunnels under Crewe station to give access to the HS2 tunnel heading north from Crewe, and put the HS2 platforms on the land between platform 12 of the existing station and Gresty Road
This is devestating news for Crewe has anybody thought about that? More companies will suffer in the error as jobs are created in The HS2 hub meaning less available candidates for all local businesses, also the quicker I can get to London from crewe will mean more local people will opt to work in London where salaries are much higher and in some cases double, I apologise for my thoughts, but it may be good to start with, but will end in less expansion in crewe due to being able to get to work in the city of London in less than an hour!
Nobody is going to commute to London from Crewe. Have you seen the price of a ticket now – a return from Crewe to London will set you back £253. I can’t believe that tickets for the new train will be anything but more expensive.
Does ‘AP’ live in the real world “nobody is going to commute to London from Crewe”.
As a regular commuter, and knowing many fellow travellers, there are hundreds of commuters in the Crewe, Nantwich and Tarporley areas who travel to London by train on a regular and daily basis.
Yes I live in the real world. Do you really commute everyday to London from Crewe? The last time I was on a train it took 1 hour 50 mins. If you are spending almost 3 hours a day commuting then good luck to you, but to me that is madness.
Good news! With HS2 that will only be about 55 minutes! Not madness any more.. In fact it’s as quick as getting a train to London from Canterbury or Rugby where plenty of people commute to London.
http://www.commuterguide.co.uk/counties/warwickshire/rugby#.VmmP1ISPn0c
Does anyone actually believe these figures? Sure there will be a slightly faster train to London, but we are to believe Cheshire will suddenly expand to the tune if a quarter of a trillion quid? And even if all the predicted stuff comes to pass, has anyone asked the people of Cheshire if they want another 100,000 homes and hundreds of factories being built.
Why would councillors or anybody else in The Northern Powerhouse, care about the people of Cheshire? What they really care about is money and how much of it they can shovel into their own pockets. Quality of life? Doesn’t even figure on their agenda. There is no way the local infrastructure will cope with such a huge expansion of jobs and people (no. of jobs x 4) . My advice is that if you care about your quality of life, to move now as far away from Crewe as possible.
Unfortunately I think Brangane is spot-on.
Far from being a positive thing for South Cheshire, HS2 will herald the destruction of the character of our area as we know it and turn it into a concrete jungle.
As Brangane suggests, if you value quality of life then you should consider moving to Shropshire or the Lake District because within a decade living in this area will become hell on earth…
Do you really think it will make that much difference? I don’t. Just because we have a slightly quicker train isn’t suddenly going to make hundreds of thousands of people move here and setup businesses.
AP- yes, I do, otherwise I wouldn’t have said it…
It will bring unbearable development pressure to the whole Crewe and Nantwich area. What’s your view on that?
My view on that is that I doubt it will be unbearable. Surely bringing jobs and prosperity to an area of the country which has lost much of its industry would be a good thing.