Subject: Cecil Sharp House Health & Safety Alert
From:
GUEST,Jeremy Main
Date: 16 May 18 - 05:51 AM
I'm posting this in my real name, because it's for the record.
The first thing to say is that I do apologise in advance for having to take a no-nonsense, no-opinions-welcome approach to the subject. What follows is as hard fact as I can find at this point.
Some of you may recall the right duffing-up I suffered four years ago when I first raised the headache of HS2 in Camden, which made me withdraw from the folk scene almost completely. However, because I care deeply for the heritage and people, now that what I said then is starting to happen, hard and real, then I have a moral duty to blow a whistle.
Firstly, what gives? The Railroad's about to run through the middle of the House, is the musical answer - or more accurately, two tunnels for high-speed trains are about to be dug so close to the foundations as to risk creating a sinkhole under the building. I emphasise is the word RISK.
What evidence do I have? Close consultation with the railway engineers, both during the public consultation phase and now, with the construction starting. It's in the HS2 plans. More importantly, now that it's happening, go look and see for yourselves. With Cecil Sharp House to your rear, walk eastwards down Glouceter Avenue, to the end of the road, cross over past the York and Albany pub, and then walk down Park Village East. Observe the nice bright new shiny noise and vibration meters they stuck on the lampposts on Monday. Watch Murphy demolish the carriage sheds to your left. There's a considerable element of Vogon behaviour in how HS2 are carrying on, because it's a big project and they rather hoped people would show some initiative. I did - but Katy Spicer refused to listen.
What is happening is that the first phase of HS2 is starting, for hard and for real. Running on the west side of the existing Euston mainline cutting (ie Cecil Sharp House's side), the tracks from the 11 platforms of the new station will narrow down to the main-line width of four tracks, running up through the Chilterns to somewhere West of Birmingham. That happens between roughly the Hampstead Road Bridge and the York and Albany, where the line goes underground into a tunnel, diving down quite steeply under the canal, before bending around under Primrose Hill - where it was originally intended to meet a spur from the North London Line, connecting to HS1 at St Pancras - before surfacing at Old Oak Common and making its merry mayhem north.
What they will be digging are two tunnels, each 50' in diameter, passing about 50' under the Regents Canal - which is only about 4' deep. I'm going to use the trackbed as the reference point for my calculations. Horizontally, two tunnels each 50' in diameter come to 100'. However, they also have space between them and the cutting wall, and between themselves, so we're now up to around 150'. Cecil Sharp House is about 110' from the cutting wall. Every one's a coconut. Vertically, I'm going to use the trackbed at rail level as my zero. In the tunnel, the trackbed's about 10' above the bottom of the floor, si=o there's about 40' overhead to the roof of the tunnel. The steepest incline a train can handle is about 1 in 100. There's about a kilometer between the Hampstead Road and Parkway bridges, so the trackbed can drop by another 30' or so, the trackbed's about 50' down, the roof 10' under Parkway. Between there and Cecil Sharp House, it'll from another meter or so, but from that, you have to subtract the way the downstairs halls are set into the ground and the way they build a tunnel - they rip the earth out, and build it in the void they've dug, back-filling with cement. That damned tunnel passes so close to the foundations it might even touch them, and the soil holding the foundations in place will be shaken to buggery. It'll be exactly like having a sinkhole under te place.
OK, so that's the 3 dimensions settled. The one remaining one is time. When they built the Thames Sewer Tunnel recently, it took six weeks between clearing the site for the construction of the cutting head and it going operational. The site here is already cleared, just behind the URL Building on Hampstead Road, the carriage sheds will be cleared in a fortnight, and the "culvert" can be constructed in a couple of weeks. If this is a Yellow Alert, the Amber Alert is when they replace the Hampstead Road and Mornington bridges, which is a weekend job, and remove the roadway in Park Village East, the Red is when they pour the slab the cutting head meshes into.
Obviously, I warnerd Katy Spicer four years ago, in writing, and posted it here. She did nothing - not even to protect the financial interests of the EFDSS. I've put what I could in place (mentions in Hansard, for example), and now that action is impending, I wrote to her again a couple of weeks ago. She was all bleat and apologies, but no practical action like finding out herself or making a hard plan - and that's why I'm putting this in writing. It's on the EFDSS Board Meeting for June, and she's meeting up with the Residents Action Committee. As at this point, it's about five weeks before the at-risk period starts. When it actually happens after that is impossible to say: the Vogon in charge of community liaison at first told me two years, but I was correct to the hour when this project was going to hit the ground, and so I raised one eyebrow and told him the six weeks was hot info. Seeing he was rumbled, he reluctantly agreed: the pessimistic side was six weeks, a week ago. I havent't had a look at the URL backyard yet. But my observation to you is: a pessimist can only be happily surprised, an optimist bitterly disappointed. Which would you rather be? HAve such precautions as are objective in place now, or which you had them ready when you need them?
I do have a rescue plan for the RVWML if they can be bothered to speak to me, but at this exact point I'm gwetting the same from the EFDSS as I had four years ago, shoot the messenger, don't face the problem. In those four years they have, quite predictably, done nothing. And they're still doing nothing in the few weeks they have left: that Board briefing should have been held four years ago. The consequences for the Society itself could be equally devastating.
Me? I trained as an officer with the Army's tunnellers, I'm the son of the man who led the project designing the trains forty years ago, and I sang with the House Choir until this came up and I resigned in protest, telling Ms Spicer this in writing four years ago, and now it's upon you. Days pass, and nothing happens, days the EFDSS cannot spare. Well, Aesop got it right, in his fable of the ants and the crickets: this ant is now telling you crickets, "I told you then, and all you did was make music and dance, you did not prepare. Now the hard time upon you, I'd suggest you get hopping."
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