Crossrail 2 will signal our optimism for London’s post-EU future, writes Rohan Silva

Tread carefully over the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day.”

So begins Peter Ackroyd’s wonderful book London Under, all about the sprawling subterranean world that lies beneath the metropolis.

One of my favourite stories in the book is about Charles Pearson, an entrepreneur with a big idea. Back in the 1830s, Pearson started making the case for an underground railway to address the chronic congestion on London’s streets, clogged up by horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians making their way around.

As with most new concepts, this one was initially met with scorn and mockery. One columnist at The Times even claimed it was as fanciful as the notion of a tunnel linking England and France. But Pearson was a tenacious businessman, and stuck at it.

In 1846, Parliament finally started looking at proposals to deal with London’s traffic problem.

Joseph Paxton, who later designed the Crystal Palace, suggested a magnificent railway towering 100 feet in the air, covered with a glass roof and running for 11 miles across the city. That was obviously a bit bonkers, so in the end Pearson’s company was given permission to start digging the world’s first underground train line from Paddington to Farringdon. The Metropolitan Railway opened in January 1863, and was hugely popular from the start, with over 30,000 passengers a day.

Sadly, Pearson died just a few weeks before his railway opened, so he never got to see his dream come to life. But all of us who live and work in London owe a debt to his entrepreneurial vision — and this ambitious and optimistic spirit lives on today.

A great example is the extraordinary plan for Crossrail 2, an epic proposal for a new high-speed rail line linking north and south London, all the way from Wimbledon to Tottenham, along with new connections between the city and the rest of the country. The numbers involved are staggering — and truly Victorian in scale. Crossrail 2’s tunnels will stretch twice as far as Crossrail 1 (which starts to open at the end of next year). Sixty-thousand full-time jobs will be created during the construction phase alone, and 200,000 new homes built.

In total, the national economic benefits are expected to exceed £150 billion — with a particularly significant impact across the South East, thanks to the massive expansion to rail capacity in Surrey, Hertfordshire and beyond. These improvements are vital — without Crossrail 2, experts predict that the region’s transport network will be overloaded within a few decades.

No wonder the independent National Infrastructure Commission has described the project as a “priority”, while 60 MPs have written to ministers to urge them to approve the scheme.

Ahead of the general election, Theresa May and her team have an opportunity to think big, and channel the entrepreneurial energy of Charles Pearson.

In London Under, Ackroyd aptly calls the Tube “a symbol of collective will”. Building Crossrail 2 will be a similarly powerful signal about our common resolve to build an open, prosperous and optimistic society long after the UK leaves the EU.