A Bright Future, but for Whom? Infrastructural Promises and the Reproduction of Inequality

This article focuses on the High Speed Railway 2 (HS2) that is under construction between London and Birmingham, United Kingdom, to examine how its "promise" (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018) of a better, greener, faster, more equal, and more prosperous future has helped reproduce inter-regional inequalities between the South and North of England. While initial proposals of this infrastructure project, originally planned to be the largest in Europe, offered the closing of the gap between the prosperous South and the struggling North, the recent cancellation of the project's northern leg exposed the government's foregrounding of the South in decisions relating to financial and infrastructural investment. The discontinuation of the HS2 led to an outcry in the North, which expressed feelings of disappointment, abandonment, and their future being cancelled. Based on participant-observations at community events and interviews with local authorities, HS2 managers, and members of affected communities in London (in the south-east of England) and Crewe (in the north-west of Englad), this paper questions who the real benefaciaries of this mega infrastructure project are. It examines how promises of jobs, greater connectivity, and economic relief legitimised public spending on the HS2 only to reproduce inter-regional inequalities between the South and the North.