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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Environment
Patrick Barkham

‘It’s been beyond difficult’: earthworks of HS2 take toll on Chilterns residents

HS2 Chilterns Sarah Turner Wendover
A worker in hi-vis orange climbing a tree
Tree felling at Jones’ Hill Wood in Great Missenden in 2021. The HS2 railway from London to Birmingham is Britain’s biggest building site. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images

Margaret Bunce used to look from her cottage window over a swoop of fields of wheat and small copses. Now when she opens her curtains each morning, the rural valley between Great Missenden and Wendover is dominated by the concrete and earthworks of HS2.

Orange-clad men and their yellow diggers and dumpers are building cuttings and viaducts to take the high-speed railway on its path through a swath of the Chilterns area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB), now known as a national landscape.

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