The Ol' New Town Blues [Construction Infrastructure]

WHEN YOU first see Ebbsfleet International railway station in the distance, something doesn't appear quite right. It is one of the best-connected stations in the country. Four trains an hour will have you in London St Pancras in just 17 minutes on the high-speed line. There are even Eurostar trains that serve the station to take passengers directly to France and Belgium. But it is surrounded mostly by fields and empty car parks. Even in non-pandemic times, it is far from a hive of activity. Why? Because the town and population it was built to serve does not yet exist. But as the surrounding mud-coated roads and background hum of cement mixer lorries makes clear, this is slowly beginning to change. Since 2010, Ebbsfleet has been slowly rising from the site of a former chalk quarry. Nestled between Swanscombe, Gravesend and the A2, the area is the government's flagship attempt at diffusing the housing crisis by building an entirely new town that will, eventually, have 15,000 new homes, and tens of thousands of new residents. In 2014, then chancellor George Osborne rechristened the project as Ebbsfleet Garden City, evoking the earlier 20th century new towns like Letchworth and Welwyn, and the ideas of pioneering urban planner Ebenezer Howard, whose principles led him to advocate developments that included more green space and were more liveable than what at the time were squalid and crowded inner cities.