The Big Tent Foundation will push forward the idea of a region bringing together Britain’s northern Pennine cities, the northeast and Scotland at a special event this month. Dr Alan James, who has worked on the Virgin Hyperloop One project, sees an opportunity to take a new technology which is under development on both sides of the Atlantic and use it to transform lives. He described how passengers in pods in vacuum tubes could travel at 670mph between towns and cities.
He said hyperloops would allow people to go for a “business meeting in Newcastle and then go for a pint in Manchester”.
Journeys between Liverpool and Manchester would take five minutes, he said, with pods going from Manchester to Leeds in six minutes; pods could travel from Liverpool to Newcastle in 16 minutes, and take 14 minutes to go from Newcastle to Edinburgh.
Describing the economic impact of better links, he said: “The answer to the north-south divide is not about north-south connectivity, it’s about east-west. It’s about connecting the north to itself.”
The HS2 high-speed network which will first link London and Birmingham, he said, was “effectively useless for trips which are not to or from London”.
Asking if the UK will be the first to fully develop this environmentally-friendly hyperloops, he said: “Is this technologically empowered Britain going to do something that once again changes the world, like we did with railways, like we did with the jet engine, or are we going to be risk-averse and let somewhere else get there first?”
The online Big Tent event on January 13 will also look at tax breaks and policies which could allow the super city region to thrive and feature contributions from speakers including the foundation’s founder, Conservative MP George Freeman, and Professor Phil Blythe, the Department for Transport’s chief scientific adviser.
Dr Paul Goldsmith, a trustee of Big Tent, stressed the importance of bringing northern towns and cities together. He argues that a key reason why the southeast of England has enjoyed economic success is because there is a large pool of skilled people.
Game-changing transport connections linking northern communities would, he said, create a “people mass” which would make the super region internationally competitive.
People can register for the Big Tent event at https://bigtent.org.uk/event/
