• The Daily Telegraph
• Le Figaro
• The New York Post
• L’Orient-Le Jour
• L'Osservatore Romano
• The Irish Times
• Conservative Home
• The Jewish Chronicle

• FAZ / Eng.
• NZZ / Eng.
• Magyar Nemzet
• ABC.es
• The Catholic Herald
• Il Foglio
• London Playbook
• Financial Times

France

Mitteleuropa

Knickerbockers

Argentina

The Levant

Africa

Cape of Good Hope

Netherlands

Scandinavia

Québec

India

Muscovy

Germany

The Critic invited me to put together a few musings on the aesthetic, economic, and political impact of the JLE and the fundamentally Conservative vision that drove it. You can read it here:

■ The Half-Forgotten Promise of the Jubilee Line

Since it went up this morning, I received a kind email from Tom Newton, son of the late Sir Wilfred Newton who (as you can read in my piece) envisioned and managed the project:

You may be interested that as a family we well remember his intense frustration with the government of the time when they tried to cut back the cost of the project by reducing numbers of planned escalators across the new stations – he had to fight tooth and nail to keep the designs intact and indeed offered to resign over the matter and ultimately successfully defended the designs against cuts. He was very firm that he had no intention of building something which suffered the same capacity issues as the Victoria line resulting from similar reductions in capacity required by government during its construction. This was one of the very few times I ever saw him angry about anything.

He developed excellent relationships with railway engineers and architects whilst in Hong Kong and loved being involved in these large scale infrastructure projects – he was made an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Engineers as a result. He loved being involved in the JLE project very much. He was absolutely fascinated in how the engineers managed the risk of tunnelling across London without damaging other lines and keeping Big Ben standing.

He was asked to lead the construction of the new Hong Kong airport but decided it was time he had spent enough time in Hong Kong.

As a director of HSBC he knew Sir Norman Foster well from when he was the architect on the HSBC office building in Hong Kong. However, when he was asked by the HSBC board to oversee the building of the Canary Wharf office with Sir Norman as the architect, he was asked by the board to make sure Sir Norman was kept on a very tight leash on this build after the massive cost overruns on the Hong King building.

As regards the canopy at the JLE Canary Wharf station Dad had some robust conversations with Sir Norman about adjusting its design to make sure it would be possible to keep clean.

He always had an extraordinary ability to talk to anyone, cut through to the essentials of anything and take a very principled approach in dealing with people and problems.

Many thanks, Tom, for contributing this closer historical perspective of the Jubilee Line Extension’s construction.

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