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Southeast London is notorious for lacking public transport services that meet the standard of the rest of the city, but one major project looks to finally be rectifying that. After years of rumours, polls and petitions, we’ve finally got a bit more info about the extension of the Bakerloo line.
TfL has revealed that extending the Bakerloo past Elephant & Castle and all the way to Lewisham could be complete by 2040. It would include the building of two new tube stations – one called Burgess Park in Old Kent Road’s old Tesco, and one called Old Kent Road in a former Toys ‘R’ S store. The extension would then go on to New Cross Gate and finish in Lewisham.
Plans suggest the extension won’t come cheap. In 2014, the cost of the project was estimated by Boris Johnson (Mayor of London at the time) to be around £2 billion, but that’s apparently now spiralled to somewhere between £5 and £8 billion.
TfL has made it pretty clear that some of the funding would need to come from the central government, but the local boroughs of Lewisham and Southwark will likely be involved in covering the cost, too.
While nearly £8 bil sounds like an awful lot of cash, the project would lower carbon emissions and improve air quality in the area. Plus, a TfL report said that it’d ‘support the delivery of around 50,000 news homes in southeast London… and over 85,000 jobs within 45 minutes of the extension,’ according to London SE1.
The Government has already announced it’ll lend money to property developers Berkeley Homes to begin the construction of 1,400 homes in the Old Kent Road area, so there’s a lot of people who’d benefit from better Underground services. In fact, TfL’s report suggests the extension would mean an extra 150,000 public transport trips per day.
This is all still hypothetical as plans haven’t been given the go-ahead just yet, but works could begin in 2030 and take a decade to complete. Until then, there’ll likely be some pressure on improving other public transport services in the Old Kent Road area, like limited stop bus services.
You can have a look at a map of the extension proposal on TfL’s website here.
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