Understand - Derailed: The Story of HS2: 8. Help I’m Under a Digger

Download Derailed: The Story of HS2: 8. Help I’m Under a Digger

After successfully defeating a number of fracking projects, a wave of hardened environmentalists join the anti-HS2 protest movement. Locking themselves to fences and ancient trees, civil disobedience arrived at the frontline of building sites. But injunctions and evictions clear the protest camps, and the added cost is a drop in HS2’s very large bucket. The bigger threat to HS2’s national image arrived in the unlikely form of a notorious environmental mitigation: the Sheephouse Wood Bat Mitigation Structure - or as it’s better known, the Bat Tunnel.

Presenter: Kate Lamble
Producer: Robert Nicholson
Executive Producer: Will Yates
Sound Design and Mix: Arlie Adlington

A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4

Published on Monday, 21st July 2025.

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