Arriving with a Whoosh: trains… and capital?
Did you catch this month’s high-speed rail announcement? I know, I was surprised too. The cost! The time it’s taken to get to this point! The consequences!
Anyway, that’s enough about Indonesia, where the southern hemisphere’s first high-speed rail line opened this month. At a cost of $7.3bn, Whoosh is already moving customers at 350 km/h between Jakarta, one of the world’s biggest cities, and Bandung, less well known outside Indonesia but a city that’s on course to be more populous than London thanks to its new infrastructure.
Would HS2 have won more support with a jazzier, whooshier name? Maybe, though that alone would not have been enough to ensure its vision was fulfilled. But names, phrases and language matter.
Japan’s Shinkansen conjures up a sense of futuristic glamour, even though it means “new trunk line”. Rap fans might favour Germany’s ICE T trains, while Hong Kong’s Vibrant Express has been speeding passengers up into mainland China for the past five years.
(Re)naming High Speed 2 High Capacity 2, as one developer suggested on social media last week, may have helped remind politicians of why the project was conceived. I’d venture a different name that could help next time (and let’s hope there is a next time). It’s another Japanese word, Kaizen, where continuous improvement delivers a competitive advantage. It’s a name that may have – and may yet - capture the imagination and secure support.
As I say, names matter. And beyond the tracks, there’s been no shortage of focus on the language of the built environment in the last few weeks.
At Opportunity London, which took place 24 hours before LREF at Mansion House in London last month, the focus was on the defining themes that will determine the capital’s competitive advantage in the years ahead. Housing, life sciences, energy and inward investment were, rightly, to the fore. As incoming Opportunity London chief executive Jace Tyrell – you’ll remember him from his New West End Company days – said: “Global capital has a choice.” That’s a phrase that should resonate in the years ahead.
Other turns of phrase bounded around the halls of Messe München a fortnight later with “Stay alive ‘til ‘25” chief among them. Not so much a strategy as a howl, this was an acknowledgement that there is more pain – at least for some – to come. Experience tells me Expo Real is often where howls start.
That said, by the end of the week in Munich concern felt focused more on the continent and beyond and less on the UK. Assets have again been repriced quicker here than in Germany and France. The generally positive outlook for offices could not contrast more sharply with what’s being experienced in the US.
Again, global capital has a choice, and London will seem a better one if, to put it crudely, everywhere else appears worse. Capital will trickle into the capital as a result. Add the right political interventions to competitive advantage and it might even arrive at high speed, perhaps even with a whoosh.
Damian Wild
ING Managing Director