Film Screening of HS2: Whose Line is it Anyway? A film by Duncan Pickstock

The film follows a group of local protesters in Camden, London who are trying to stop HS2 from expanding Euston Station to the West, cutting down trees, knocking down many council flats and digging up St James’s Gardens, a cemetery that holds about 60,000 bodies. It uses the experiences of these protesters as a lens to look at Hs2 and to try and discover why, when there are so many reasons why it shouldn’t, it is going ahead.

The film places the protesters and HS2 in a broader context that shines a light on how public policy can be hijacked by small groups of well-connected and well-resourced individuals. It looks at the power exerted by lobbyists peddling falsehoods with impunity and it examines how the Byzantine structures and procedural complexities of national government create an environment where local people are excluded from influencing the decisions that impact on them and their families, where public consultation is widely seen as meaningless and where small groups of well-connected and well-resourced individuals are able to have their own personal interests presented as ‘the national interest’.

Introduced by Professor John Tomaney, Bartlett School of Planning