View on HS2 from the Chilterns: ‘A big vanity project like Concorde’

Buckinghamshire villagers say project has already caused irreversible damage

Frances Cutler, a resident of South Heath, a small village in Buckinghamshire, has never really believed that HS2 would be built. "It's ludicrous," she said, sitting in her sunny front room, 700 metres from where the high-speed trains are planned to emerge from a tunnel underneath the Chilterns. "We've been saying for years it was going to cost more than 100bn but nobody listened. I've always thought that it doesn't make business sense."

On Wednesday, the government confirmed there would be a review of the project with a "go or no-go" decision expected at the end of the year. The chances that it could be scrapped increased with the appointment of Lord Berkeley, a Labour peer and critic of the scheme, as the review's deputy chair.