About the Forum. We are a neighbourhood forum designated by OPDC in 2017 and redesignated in 2022. We hold meetings via Zoom each month, open to all our members. Our regular slot is at 6.30pm on the first Thursday of each month, for an hour or so. The Zoom link is circulated a few days in advance.
Our next Zoom meeting will by at 6.30pm on Thursday 6th Febriary 2025. Slides from our January 9th are now posted on this site.
Future plans for Old Oak and the area around the half-built HS2/Elizabeth Line rail interchange at Old Oak Common have become clearer in the past six months. Work on the tunnels from Old Oak Common station to Euston is expected to start soon. Plans for what happens at the Euston end remain uncertain.
In 2025 OPDC will be seeking to find one or more developers interested in investing on sites which OPDC has assembled. The timetabkle for the first HS2 trains to opeate to and from OOC station, as an initial London terminus, may well go beyond the 2033 official forecast. The ‘reset’ of the HS2 programme and its escalating budget, will not be completed until the middle of this year. We await a revised version of the OPDC Strategic Transport Study, not updated since 2015.
Meanwhile the period of years during which Old Oak Common station will need to act as a London terminus for HS2 has extended into the late 2030s and possibly the 2040s. This has major implications for the surrounding area. OOC station was designed primarily as a rail interchange and not as a terminus.
There are many questions about access to the station by all forms of transport. In this ever-changing scenario, our Zoom sessions are aimed at keeping local residents as informed and up to date as possible. Although HS2 hold ‘community meetings’ the answers given to questions from our members are often limited and do not address the bigger issues.
Given the many uncertainties surrounding plans for the Old Oak area, OPDC and HS2 have recently agreed last year to hold six weekly sessions small group of members of OONF and the Grand Union Alliance, for an exchange of information. These meetinmgs are proving useful, and what we learn from them is fed back to our monthly Zoom sessions.
Please email to oonforum@gmail.com to join our mailing/membership list. PDFs of the slides used at our meetings can be downloaded from this page on this website. You are welcome to join the Forum if you live or work in (or near) the area of north-west London for which the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation has been the local planning authority since 2015. Membership of the Forum is free and open to all.