Highline bites the dust

Featured in the Future Transport London Newsletter July 2026

The scheme put forward by business group Camden Town Unlimited in 2023 to open an elevated public park and greenway from Camden Town to King's Cross alongside the North London rail line has been ‘paused’.

The proposal was to make use of currently disused railway land alongside the live railway. Future Transport London objected to the scheme principally because the land is likely to be needed in the future to increase the capacity of the railway. Our argument for this is set out in the article below by Neil Roth.

 Funding for the project initially seemed promising. £64,000 was raised through crowdfunding and the GLA contributed £2,500 through its Crowd Fund London programme. It received around £1.2 million from the National Lottery Community Fund and also approximately £950,000 from the HS2 Community and Environment Fund, which contributed. An additional £400,000 came from a Section 106 agreement with King’s Cross developers Argent, money which might otherwise have been spent equipping bus route 214 with double deckers. 

The initial planning application was for a short stretch from Camden Gardens to Royal College Street incorporating a spacious section where platforms 3 and 4 used to be, an area likely to be needed again for an expansion of Camden Road station, (see article below). Access would have been by stairs and lifts.

How the Highline might have looked

The complete walkway – about 1.2km – would have terminated on York Way with various access points along the route. It was advertised as a pleasant way to walk from Camden Town to King’s Cross, although the York Way terminus is further from King’s Cross than the canal towpath. No planning permission has been sought for the section beyond Camden Road station.

The idea for the Highline came from the successful walkway in New York, itself inspired by Coulée verte René-Dumont in Paris. Both these elevated walkways are on the path of abandoned railways. The notion of a walkway alongside a live railway is a new one incorporating all kinds of hazards from signalling equipment to passing trains.

Andrew Bosi adds the following:

Future Transport London is delighted to learn that the controversial scheme to create Camden Highline alongside the Mildmay railway line has been abandoned.

Similar to the infamous Garden Bridge, the scheme would have utilised a publicly funded asset for private sector gain. Its proponents managed to secure funding intended to upgrade local bus routes necessitated by the King's Cross Railway Land developments.  Its promotion flew in the face of Camden and the Mayor's aspirations for the railway, which are to restore platform 3 at Camden Road station and reinstate railway track.  These are needed to address severe overcrowding on the Mildmay line east of Camden Road, and the need for modal shift of freight traffic from road to rail. There is a more useful pedestrian route between Camden and King's Cross along the canal towing path.

Credit should go to John Cox who has led the campaign against the Highline and for platform 3 with a series of advertisements in the Camden New Journal.

Although the advocates of the scheme claimed it had planning permission, permission had only been granted for a short section of the route and was subject to section 106 conditions which had not been met.