We found that large new housing areas in England were very rarely built with a new station to cater for future residents. The few examples we found were generally in London or in other cities. Even then, there were problems with delayed delivery of stations as we saw at the large Beam Park housing development in east London.

Car parks at existing stations are growing

People do however want to travel by train, so it is not surprising that we saw larger and larger station car parks to cope with people arriving by car. Decked car parks were being built as many stations became ‘parkways’. Meanwhile, local metro-style stations actually situated within large developments with bus interchanges and cycle storage, as we had seen in the Netherlands and Germany, were lacking.

Proposals rarely become new stations

The idea of a new station to serve new housing is popular. Developers may talk about a ‘new station’ in their marketing. The media runs the story, councillors and businesses are on board and local MPs champion the cause. Everyone is excited. But even when many thousands of new homes are in the pipeline, even when everyone is behind the idea, we have seen again and again how aspirations for new stations come to nothing, or the station takes years, even decades to build. In many cases, enlargements to the road system get funding as opposed to rail.

Green Park station opened in 2023 on the outskirts of Reading to cater for the Green Park Village new housing area and new offices. It has two trains per hour in the direction of Reading and Basingstoke, the other way. Our only disappointment is that the station is not more integrated with the fabric of the development in the same way as we saw for example in Kidbrooke (South East London) or Barking Riverside (East London).