HS2: the human cost of Britain’s most expensive ever rail project | Patrick Barkham

Protesters against HS2 have been dismissed as nimbys, but there's more at stake than house prices. Is there no future for life in the slow lane?

Ron Ryall, wearing an oil-smudged blue boilersuit, was fettling a cream Morris Minor in his low wooden workshop on a lane where the suburbs of West Ruislip give way to scrapyards, dog kennels and horse paddocks. A strong whiff of solvents filled his shed and the rain battered on the roof. Ryall was born in a council house on this lane and started his car bodywork repair business there in 1962; it remained, he said, his own little world.

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