Boris Johnson says it’s now time to build Crossrail 2

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Elizabeth line – which was also attended by the Queen herself – Johnson said: “The real thing for us now is to think about Crossrail 2, the old Chelsea-Hackney line.

“That is going to be transformative again. All the problems of commuters coming into Waterloo getting up to north London, you can fix that with another Crossrail. I think we should be getting on with that.”

The long-proposed Crossrail 2 would run south-west to north-east through London, from Clapham Junction to Seven Sisters. It is also hoped that, like the Elizabeth line, it could continue outside of the city, extending into Sussex on the south west end and Hertfordshire on the northern end.

The project was officially mothballed in November 2020, due to funding issues brought on by the pandemic. This was despite the government having already spent over £115M on developing the plan, as revealed by NCE.

Since then, there have been signs that the Crossrail 2 project is not entirely dead. Shortly after being appointed London’s deputy mayor for transport in January this year, Seb Dance said that he would like to “bring back” the Crossrail 2 scheme – as long as a capital funding agreement could be agreed between Transport for London (TfL) and the Department for Transport (DfT).

However, the negotiations over a capital funding settlement for TfL have been raging for months, with no agreement reached thus far.

Provisions for Crossrail 2 have also been written into new plans for HS2’s Euston station and the expansion of the British Library, suggesting it is still a serious consideration.

Johnson’s latest proclamation of support for Crossrail 2 is the closest the government has come to officially throwing its weight behind building the new line since it was mothballed. In the same interview, he said: “We need all the partners to come together and say this is the right thing for our city and here’s how we're going to do it.

“Then we in central Government will study it, obviously we’ll give it our support. But we need to see the business case originated by Transport for London, by London business, and we want it brought to us.”

Johnson mentioned that “we should be looking at tax increment financing”, though this is unlikely to be enough to fund the multi-billion pound project on its own.

He linked Crossrail 2 to the government’s levelling up agenda, saying “public transport is the thing that gives people opportunity. It allows people to get cheaply and conveniently from where they live to the place where they can have a good high-skill high-wage job. It’s vital for levelling up.”

However, he has previously promised to build other major infrastructure projects such as Northern Powerhouse Rail and the eastern leg of HS2 in full, citing both as clear cases for levelling up, only for the government to later reveal severely scaled-back versions of those schemes.

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