Day One: West Ruislip to Great Missenden, nine miles



Ron Ryall, wearing an oil-smudged blue boilersuit, was fettling a cream Morris Minor in his low wooden workshop on a lane where the suburbs of West Ruislip give way to scrapyards, dog kennels and horse paddocks. A strong whiff of solvents filled his shed and the rain battered on the roof. Ryall was born in a council house on this lane and started his car bodywork repair business there in 1962; it remained, he said, his own little world.

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Earlier that day, in an August downpour, I had set out to walk the route of the first phase of HS2, the new high-speed railway that, when it is completed in 2026, will stretch from London to Birmingham. I wanted to follow at 3mph the path the trains will take at 225mph, to see how they will transform the middle of England. Stepping out from West Ruislip station, where HS2 will emerge from a tunnel under north-west London, I crossed Breakspear Road South. Cars sluiced past noisily on wet asphalt. A forbidding fence stopped me exploring New Years Green Covert, the first of 59 ancient woodlands (more than 400 years old) which will be blighted, or even obliterated, by this first phase of HS2, according to the Woodland Trust. I had to press myself into brambles on a single-track road to avoid lorries destined for a municipal tip. The rain had penetrated my waterproof, and I was grateful for the chemical embrace of Ryall’s workshop.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ron Ryall will lose his business and home in West Ruislip if, as seems likely, the HS2 line is built. Photograph: Felix Clay/The Guardian

Under the current plans for the route of HS2, one pillar of a viaduct whisking high-speed trains over the Colne Valley will go through Ryall’s living room. “It’s going to wipe my house out,” he said, giving me an intense look from behind wire-framed, aviator-style spectacles. “But do you know the thing that really bites?” he pointed to his home, which was not visible behind an overgrown hedge. “It’s Grade II listed. Queen Elizabeth I visited it in 1601. Cecil Kinross, who won the Victoria Cross at Passchendaele – he was born there.” Four generations of Ryall’s family live in the house – his mother, his aunt, Ryall and his wife, their son and daughter, and their grandchildren. He recently restored the property, the pedigree of which meant that he required approval from the planning authorities for every detail. “We took 10 years rebuilding it – they were arguing about the colour of the roof tiles – and within six weeks of finishing it, they said they were going to bloody bulldoze it.”

His workshop will be erased by the new line too. “This isn’t a hard-luck story. I’ve got everything I could possibly want. I’ve worked all my bloody life for that – from a council house to a mansion. I’m quite proud of what I’ve done. It’s just this, ‘Well, we’re taking it’ attitude. Everybody feels sorry for you.”

“I don’t,” interrupted his colleague Mick, who was removing the dents from a Vauxhall. “He’s always fucking moaning.”

Ryall laughed. He had been to Westminster to petition MPs about changing the route. Anyone affected by HS2 can address concerns to a select committee of six MPs, who can ask HS2 Ltd, the government-funded company that is developing the railway, to tweak its plans. “I love my country but I fear my government,” he said, fishing some sheets of A4 from his pocket with a flourish. It was a British Library factsheet about Britain’s constitution. “We haven’t got one! And we should have. It’s all going wrong. This is wrong – what they are doing with ordinary people.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Harefield Marina on the Grand Union Canal in Hillingdon, Greater London. Photograph: Patrick Barkham/The Guardian

HS2 will be the first mainline railway built between British cities since the Great Central linked London and Sheffield in 1899. During the 20th century Britain built roads, not railways, and other countries swooshed past us: the Japanese with their 198mph Shinkansen, the French with their 200mph TGVs and the Chinese with their 268mph Maglev. So when the government announced HS2 in 2010, it emphasised that 250mph trains will cut London-Birmingham rail journeys to 49 minutes, saving 32 minutes. Critics questioned the need for modest time-savings and deplored the rising cost of HS2 to a predicted £56.6bn, nearly 10 times the price of the 68-mile HS1 between the Channel Tunnel and London. In response, HS2 Ltd reduced the top speed of the trains, and placed less emphasis on shorter journey times in its publicity announcements. Instead, HS2’s supporters have argued that a new south-north connection will ease a looming capacity crisis on the railways and boost the economy beyond London. The West Coast Mainline from London to Glasgow via Birmingham and Manchester cannot carry many more trains: the solution is the most expensive piece of infrastructure ever built in Britain.

This glamorous project enjoys the cross-party support of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Phase one, 119 miles from the capital to Birmingham, is minutely mapped out. A bill is expected to be passed by parliament in 2017, granting powers to begin construction. Spades will hit the soil the following year.

Day Two: Misbourne Valley to Wendover, 6.5 miles



Railways are well liked and environmentally friendly, passenger numbers are soaring and HS2 is as popular with Westminster politicians as it is with Chinese investors. I expected to find opposition as I explored how HS2 will change the middle of England but, as I walked on, I was surprised by the depth of the disconnect from Westminster thinking. To many residents, HS2 has come to symbolise a country run against the interests of the many and in the interests of the few.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An anti-HS2 banner in Potter Row, near South Heath, Buckinghamshire, close to the proposed route. Photograph: Patrick Barkham/The Guardian

On the second day of my journey, I met Jacky Statham standing by a stile in drizzle on the side of the Misbourne valley, above her home in the village of Great Missenden. The route of HS2 will pass a few miles from her door. Asked what she felt about HS2, she said: “Absolute horror. Despair, horror, depression, anxiety. They are lovely big expensive houses round here. We have to be careful not to say, ‘My house used to be worth £3m, now it’s worth £2m’, but there are a lot of normal people here too, like me.” The Chilterns is a place of beech woods whose residents tolerate the slow trains on tracks laid by Victorians into Marylebone station. Following the route of HS2 there was easy. “Stop HS2” and “Bury HS2” posters were fixed to lampposts, banners hung between fine trees over country roads. In response to a well-organised campaign, it has been agreed that the line will be buried in a 10-mile tunnel beneath the chalk hills, emerging by the village of South Heath.

The valley was filled with traffic noise from the busy A413 and a line of pylons crackled in the damp. “Where we are standing is the heart of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty designated by law, unless the government dictates that they can completely destroy it. Max, stop it,” she said, as one of her Norfolk terriers leapt at my legs. “It’s like the partition of India – they just got a blue crayon out. It should be in a tunnel to the other side of Wendover. Once it’s done it’s – pardon my French – buggered for ever.”

The beech copses that hugged the hillsides smelt of foxes and were filled with pheasants. They reminded me of the illustrations in Danny the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl’s romantic children’s story about a boy and his poacher-father. (It was not until I walked into Great Missenden and saw a museum decorated with the words “Swizzfigglingly Flushbunkingly Gloriumptious” that I realised this was where Dahl lived.) The footpaths I followed became swamped with knapweed, bramble and nettle. I reached a field of old tractors and rusty bits of machinery. This pleasantly dilapidated farm will be wiped out as HS2 crosses the valley on another viaduct. A yellow JCB was running in the yard and inside a dusty barn I found a dusty farmer wearing a bright blue jumper.

“There’s still a lot of this around here,” he said, tugging on an imaginary forelock when I asked him about HS2 (though he declined to give his name). His grandfather and father were tenant farmers and obeyed strict rules: they were not even allowed to shoot a rabbit for dinner and, as a boy, he would not walk up his landlord’s drive with hands in pockets. He had been “daft enough” to buy 170 acres in his 30s and was still going, aged 68, with beef cattle and arable land. And HS2? “A pain in the arse. You can’t plan anything.” Farmers plan five, 10 years ahead and this complaint was repeated along the route.

What about the consultation process? He felt it had not included the little people: HS2 Ltd “haven’t really met anybody – only those that want a free lunch, the hooray Henrys”. And so he had not petitioned parliament. Instead, he had simply received official HS2 letters addressed “to the owner”. Over the last five years, he said, no one had bothered to discover his name. “We haven’t seen anyone with a collar and tie yet, with money in his pocket, who can tell us what to do.”

This farmer was nurturing his land to pass on to his son. “That’s what’s farming is about. Well, what we think farming is about.” He gestured to the lovely patchwork countryside around us. “We’ve made it. The peasants have made it.”

Days Three and Four: Stoke Mandeville to Finemere, 24.5 miles



At Wendover, 20 miles into my walk, the Chilterns vanished and the Vale of Aylesbury lay ahead, flatter fields of heavy clay soil that clung to my walking boots. HS2 will pass close to the modest housing estates of west Aylesbury and at a more respectful distance from Waddesdon Manor, a French chateau built on a wooded hill by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1874. It was uncanny how HS2 appeared to be so straight but subtly avoided stately homes, churches and (most) golf courses. It could not, however, miss the estate belonging to Christopher Prideaux, whose family have farmed a patch of the old royal hunting forest of Bernwood, in Buckinghamshire, for 500 years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christopher Prideaux, a former high sheriff of Buckinghamshire outside the llisted house his family have owned for centuries. He is fighting to stop the railway being built. Photograph: Felix Clay/The Guardian

Prideaux and his wife live in a low-ceilinged farmhouse to which they moved so their son and his family could reside in their spacious old hall. Prideaux was smartly turned out in a blue checked shirt, red tank top and mustard cords, but drove me around his 1,400 acres in a middle-aged Subaru estate with tattered newspapers in the footwell. HS2 will pretty much divide his land down the middle. One of his two tenant farms will cease to be economically viable. He will lose farm buildings and a lodge. “In an estate agent’s patter, it’s ‘a fine rural location’ and all that sort of garbage,” he said. The new line will pass shudderingly close to the hall, which is listed as Grade II* – a highly protected category of building. “It’s an architectural mix-up of Elizabethan, Jacobean and William & Mary. Everybody’s had a go at it,” he said, which did not really do justice to the gracefully proportioned house. He then added: “It’s one of the three or four most important houses on the line between London and Birmingham.”

Residents within 60m of the line can sell their property to the government for its “unblighted” value. Even if Prideaux does not sell up, he will be compensated for HS2: there will be money for lost acreage, lost production and also “injurious affection”. Which means? “In my best Australian, total buggeration.” Prideaux scoffed at the theory shared by some local people that big landowners secretly favoured HS2 because they will make millions. But then, he reflected, “everybody’s situation is different and so it’s easy for HS2 to play divide and rule. If you’re an elderly landowner with no particular successors you might say, ‘I’ll roll over for a cheque.’”

Prideaux, a former high sheriff of Buckinghamshire, was not rolling over. He was lobbying MPs and petitioning parliament. “Cameron is a young man in a hurry. Major infrastructure projects are not things to be done in a hurry when we are a little country.” He had a touching faith in the democratic process and was looking forward to a Lords’ debate on the economic case for HS2, scheduled for the following month.

We sat in the Subaru, Prideaux discussing HS2’s destruction of his huge blackthorn hedges, a relic of the hunting forest, and the rare butterflies and bats that depend on them. Environmental consultants employed by HS2 have been scrambling to understand what wildlife it threatens, and what “mitigation” – the planting of replacement hedgerows, woods or other habitats – can be undertaken. Prideaux watches Bechstein’s bats, a particularly rare species, feeding in Grendon Wood, the inspiration for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An example of a rare Bechstein’s bat roost in a partially hollow oak tree, Finemere Wood, Buckinghamshire, ancient wood and nature reserve next to HS2 Photograph: Patrick Barkham/The Guardian

After Prideaux dropped me off in a neighbour’s muddy farmyard, I climbed a hill into Finemere Woods, an ancient woodland owned by Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust. At the top was a scrawny oak with a creviced scar – part of the mouse-sized Bechstein’s main roost. HS2 will divide these roosts from the bat’s feeding grounds on Prideaux’s land. Tim Read, a young ecologist with a bouncy stride, took me on a tour of the wood. “There’s also brown long-eared, natterers, pipistrelles,” he said. An infrequently used freight line taking Londoners’ rubbish to landfill had become “a great little highway for bats” alongside the wood, he said. But high-speed lines do not permit wooded embankments. Trees – and deer and badgers – are a menace to fast trains. So a concrete and steel-fenced barrier will be built along the length of the track, through the middle of England.

I walked on, refuelling with blackberries from the hedgerow, following the route as it swept past a vast new incinerator, several quarries and landfill sites and a wealth of handsome working farms. Everyone I came across criticised HS2. Phil Jenkins was planting lavender outside his 1930s semi in Calvert Green; the line will pass within yards of his home. “These bloody – excuse my French – trains. It’s just for rich men,” he said.

“It’s vanity, isn’t it?” said Mike Roberts, taking down banner adverts around the immaculate recreation ground in the village of Twyford, the cricket season over for another year. “Maggie had her tunnel, Blair had his war and Cameron wants his train. It’s a legacy.”

“I don’t think we’re being nimbys. If we thought it was necessary we’d be for it,” said Pauline Harkin, the tenant at Blackgrounds Farm, a low farmhouse and a cluster of pigsties converted into stables where the only sound was the atonal chirp of sparrows. This year, Harkin had erected a box and attracted barn owls to nest in her barn. “You almost feel cruel enticing them in knowing that in a couple of years they’ll be gone. There’s no light pollution here, you can see every single star in the sky. They do not understand what they are about to destroy. The sound of birds singing in the morning is amazing here. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for ever.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The farm where Pauline Harkin breeds horses will be obliterated by HS2. Photograph: Felix Clay/The Guardian

Days Five and Six: Newton Purcell to Hunningham, 37.25 miles



The Victorians would have enthusiastically endorsed HS2. The Great Central, which opened in 1899, was the brainchild of Sir Edward Watkin, an indefatigable Victorian entrepreneur, and might be considered Britain’s first high-speed railway. It duplicated existing routes from Sheffield to London but was a superior piece of engineering: gentle curves and gradients and only one level crossing. Most notably, it was wide enough to take continental trains, for Watkin had a much bigger idea: why not connect England with continental Europe via a tunnel under the Channel? He dug a mile-and-a-quarter beneath the cliffs west of Dover, where he invited dignitaries, including the archbishop of Canterbury and the Prince of Wales, to champagne receptions in the tunnel shaft. But Watkin’s scheme was torpedoed by a hostile press and generals who feared a French invasion.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A typical view of a Northamptonshire field through which HS2 will pass, near Halse Copse. Photograph: Patrick Barkham/The Guardian

Watkin would surely be gratified to find HS2 shadowing the skeleton of the Great Central, through north Buckinghamshire. I tried following the old line. Many disused railways have been turned into green footpaths, but this had been abandoned and enveloped in hawthorn, sallow and elder, with the occasional fly-tipped fridge thrown from a bridge. I waded through teasels, thistles and rosebay willowherb. Finally, I was confronted by impenetrable dereliction: great mounds of brambles and nettles. I crawled through spiky blackthorn scrub to escape: the wildest place I encountered in central England was an old railway.

We may think of England as an urban country, dominated by people and roads but HS2’s route through the middle – Buckinghamshire, a smidgen of Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire – has been plotted along a largely unpopulated fieldscape. Each field is like a room: mostly wheat or pasture but occasionally barley, oilseed rape, maize or broad beans. Industrial agriculture may have replaced rural workers with big machines but a great grid of hedges survives, like capillaries, giving life to the land. Filled with long-tailed tits or goldfinches or cackling green woodpeckers, many are as thick as houses, a coalition of holly, rowan, hazel, dogwood and bramble, with oaks permitted to grow into grand trees.

I trudged for hours on footpaths without seeing anyone. Over virtually every field in the Vale of Aylesbury soared a red kite, the handsome hawk that was extinct in England 40 years ago. Occasionally I spotted an agricultural contractor in a pick-up. Within half-a-mile of a village, I met one person walking a dog. Finally, at 11.30am on my third day of walking, close to Stoke Mandeville, the rarest species of all: three children, actually playing in the countryside.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Storm clouds gathering near Print Wood, Warwickshire. Photograph: Patrick Barkham/The Guardian

On a hilltop beyond the Northamptonshire village of Culworth, I stopped to admire the valley formed by a nameless tributary of the River Cherwell. HS2 will cut past a historic battleground, Danes Moor, below. The only buildings visible across five miles of wheat and pasture were three barns, one of which was a ruin. There were no houses, no pylons, no roads and no people. It was a landscape sculpted by humans but there were no straight lines, and a kind of alchemy in the mix of fields, hedgerows, copses; it had evolved at a gentle pace, and plants and animals survived alongside our exploitation of its fertility. So much of England possesses this grace and silence. But it has no voice.

High-speed rail was intended to close up these spaces between us. In turn, they will become less peaceful, less attractive to people and emptier than ever. But perhaps this land was ripe for developments such as HS2 because most of us had already vacated it. By the time I crossed into Warwickshire, I was wearying of the desolation. In the absence of people, communication was via signs: “Beware of the bull”, “Beware driven golf balls”, “Thieves beware, SelectaDNA advanced forensic marking is used in this area”. If strangers were not permitted to enjoy the countryside, why would anyone beyond local residents care enough to stop HS2 dividing it? So when I heard someone cheerily singing along to bhangra in his allotment on the edge of Southam, I followed the tune. Kamaljeet Bhandari, an associate specialist at University Hospital Coventry, was tending to his runner beans. “Oh yes, it’s coming just over the back there. I’m all for it,” he said. Pardon? “If we want to be competing with the first world, then we have to have it. I travel a lot. You go to China or Japan and you’d be amazed [by the railways]. People complain but the problem is, you get old – you want everything to stay the same.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kamaljeet Bhandari, an allotment-holder in Southam, Warwickshire, is in favour of HS2. Photograph: Felix Clay/The Guardian

Suddenly Bhandari produced a carrier bag and filled it with beans for me. He liked walking too. Shouldn’t we move more slowly? “Speed is normal. There’s one constant in the world and that’s change. Do you want fast internet? Of course you do. Do you have a computer for a phone? Everybody wants fast from day one.” He hated the dominance of London; how he had to go there to see a good play. But won’t HS2 make the capital even more domineering? “Many people wouldn’t think twice about applying for work in the north if they only have a 45-minute journey.” Do we really need to shave half an hour from a London-Birmingham journey? “If you say that, we should have carts instead of cars.” He laughed. “I don’t know whether I’ll be alive to see it. I’ll be too old to get on it. It will be too fast for me to catch.”

Warwickshire is densely wooded, its earth ochre and its houses red brick, not stone. I followed where HS2 will cross the pretty Leam valley and dive through the middle of South Cubbington Wood. This ancient woodland was a tangle of honeysuckle and hawthorn; its most charismatic resident a huge pear tree. Reputed to be the second-largest in the UK, it boasted five trunks, three colours – green leaves at head height, yellow further up, red at the top – and no pears. Last week it was named the Woodland Trust Tree of the Year after 10,000 people voted for it. It will be felled to make way for the new railway.

I had arranged to met Ed Green, chief executive of Warwickshire Wildlife Trust, by the tree. Like a number of conservationists, he agreed that HS2, if planned well, had the potential to benefit the environment, providing a natural corridor through the intensively farmed English countryside. “We’ve got climate change pushing species further north, but their habitats have been destroyed and broken up. HS2 is an opportunity to build a piece of ecological infrastructure, a wildlife corridor that allows species to move up through that landscape,” he said. Green sought a constructive relationship with HS2. He had offered HS2 Ltd his Wildlife Trust’s skills and surveying expertise. He had petitioned the HS2 committee of MPs and, ultimately, hoped to persuade them to tunnel under South Cubbington Wood. While the golf course at nearby Kenilworth had been reprieved, this woodland was still earmarked to be sliced in two.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ed Green, chief executive of Warwickshire Wildlife Trust outside South Cubbington Wood, near Leamington Spa. Photograph: Felix Clay/The Guardian

“What is HS2’s ambition?” said Green. “It’s just to get trains from Birmingham to London as quickly as possible. The cost of being as ambitious for the environment would be a fraction of 1% of the railway. It’s a philosophy – that the environment is a barrier to this sort of thing.”

Day Seven: South Cubbington to Kenilworth, 12.5 miles



Beyond Cubbington Wood, I approached a busy A-road and spied a huge chestnut-coloured creature inside an aviary. One large leather glove lay on a garden gatepost. I walked through the gate and knocked on a door, which opened to reveal a white-bearded man with a gravelly voice. Bob Edwards has led an interesting life: ladies’ hairdresser, car sales manager, repossession agent – “I’ve had a gun in my nose” – and, for 16 years, falconer. He flies Tweed, Richard and Bomber, three South American Harris hawks, and his passion for birds began at school, where he befriended a crow. “Corvids are very smart. Most birds of prey are,” he said. “We’re the ones who are dumb because we’ve allowed ourselves to be controlled by TV, electricity, motor cars. They are wonderful things but we’ve lost contact with the real world.”

What did he think of HS2? “It’s probably necessary,” he said, but he was upset by how HS2 Ltd has treated those affected by it. Edwards’ home and business won’t be destroyed by the line – although it passes close enough to diminish his quality of life – but his birds could be. The field next door will store soil excavated during construction. Edwards fears this long-undisturbed earth will release aspergillus spores, a fungal mould that kills raptors. He also flies his hawks every day on his neighbouring 500-acre farm, through which HS2 will speed. “My birds don’t understand a 200mph train. They will pursue their quarry – a rabbit or pheasant – unaware of the potential danger. Effectively, I’ve got to move.”

Before I finished my walk, the House of Lords debated the economic case for HS2. Torrential rain fell on the queue of people waiting outside parliament to go through security. Before listening to the debate, I ducked into the oak-panelled Walpole Room, where the HS2 committee were listening to petitioners. Political sketchwriters have mocked these discussions for resembling an obscure provincial planning meeting but this, surely, was democracy in action, where citizens could discuss their homes, hopes and livelihoods.

A farmer, Wendy Gray, gave evidence. She lived in the Chilterns and described the area as “refreshment” for stressed urbanites. She expressed fears about the construction’s impact on her business, local roads, noise and barn owls. She suggested that HS2’s mitigation could include new chalk grassland. She was polite and deferential and tried to entertain the committee by brandishing a plastic bag containing a regurgitated barn owl pellet.

The panel of MPs – all men, all of late middle age – barely glanced up. Only the chair, Robert Syms, looked engaged. Attending to endless petitioners must become repetitive. HS2’s barrister, James Strachan QC, was listening closely, however, and addressed specific points with a lawyer’s care to make no rash promises: HS2’s noise would be less than traffic on the A413; HS2 were working with the RSPB to “mitigate” for barn owls; and, “If there’s a need for chalk grassland, that’s the sort of thing that can be put into these areas to compensate.” Wendy Gray was allowed to respond: “It’s very difficult to be reassured on an unknown quantity,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An anti-HS2 sign on the A46 outside Coventry. Photograph: Patrick Barkham/The Guardian

As the committee meeting rolled on, the House of Lords debate was under way. Older versions of 1980s and 1990s politicians – Lord Carrington, John Prescott – tottered in and out of the chamber. At first, their debate drifted far from the concerns of the people I had met. Lord Desai spoke about “using animal spirits” to decide in favour of HS2. Lord Mitchell wondered whether high-speed travel was relevant because we would soon connect via holograms of ourselves. Labour peers from the north tended to favour HS2; others argued that the Manchester-Leeds electrification was more important. Lord Truscott revealed that the expected cost of construction per mile for HS2 is up to nine times higher than France’s high-speed lines. Lord Mitchell wondered if driverless cars would confound forecasts of ever-rising rail passenger numbers. The Bishop of Chester quoted from Ecclesiastes.

“My worry is that the proponents of HS2 have made the terrible business mistake of falling in love with their investment,” declared Lord Wolfson, a Conservative peer and Next chief executive who, at 48, was by far the youngest-looking person in the chamber. “The alternative to HS2 is not another grand project, it is myriad small, high-return projects that would deliver benefits in the near future: bypasses, flyovers, underpasses, commuter line upgrades, carriage improvements, platform improvements and more ... projects that would serve the many rather than the few.”

Day Eight: Berkswell to Birmingham, eight miles



My walk ended on the autumn equinox, as it had begun: in the rain. Another disused railway line near Kenilworth was now an urban “Greenway”: the companionship of cyclists and dog‑walkers was welcome after my discomfort on the deserted, brambled-choked footpaths of rural England. This tree-lined path will be noisily overtaken, and partially rerouted, by HS2. The countryside was wooded but the city’s proximity was revealed in the packaging (Carling, Capri-Sun, Cadbury’s Fingers) thrown onto verges. Planes descended into Birmingham International, as long-bodied and ponderous as cormorants rising from the ornamental lake by Berkswell Hall.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The rough meadows earmarked for HS2’s new Birmingham interchange station, Middle Bickenhill. Photograph: Patrick Barkham/The Guardian

I arrived on the edge of Birmingham. Security guards at a haulage depot eyed me. White-shirted motorists turned to stare as they sped by in executive saloons. A pedestrian is a rare sight in these parts. To the east lay the A452; to the south, the A45; to the west, the M42. Between all these connections was an island of rough meadows with a buzzard calling overhead. I found myself on a country road featuring half a dozen cottages, with porches and greenhouses. This unexpected oasis was the site of the projected Birmingham Interchange, an overhead monorail transferring passengers to the National Exhibition Centre and the airport, billed by Lord Adonis in the Lords’ debate as a “145 hectare site with the potential for 20,000 new jobs and thousands of homes”. It could become “a major enterprise zone”, Adonis, the former transport secretary now employed by HS2, told the Lords debate excitedly. But it needed “strong leadership” because there were “major unresolved green belt issues”.

These included what to do with residents. A 79-year-old woman was polishing her small car (she didn’t want to give her name). Her life had been uprooted more than 40 years ago by “the road people”. Now it was the turn of “the railway people”. “We were moved here to make way for the M42. Now they are moving us again.”

The woman’s home will be surrounded by a car park for HS2’s Birmingham Interchange. She attended a local HS2 meeting but felt patronised and ignored. “They have security at the door. There were five or six men in beautiful grey suits. The men don’t want to know. They just talk to other men.” Eventually she had collared the “understudy engineer” who traced a finger down a map, and declared: “You’re about 200 metres away from the station.” That was the end of the conversation.

Eventually, I found a crossing over the M42 to the National Exhibition Centre (NEC), which advertised itself as the best‑connected spot in Britain. The ultimate logic of our multiplying means of connecting with each other is that the countryside becomes a void between roads, railways and runways.

We need connections, of course: I trotted through the NEC, seeking its train station to take me home. I found a footpath around a cavernous new mall and supercasino, the quiet middle of England a vanishing memory as I trod over plastic grass on a temporary floating bridge that spanned an artificial lake. •

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• This article was amended on 19 November 2015 to clarify a reference to categories of listed buildings.