Emerging practices will have more chances to win work on HS2’s second phase, its design director has promised.

Former Olympic design chief Kay Hughes, who joined the £100bn high-speed rail project in autumn 2019, six months before covid struck, said there would be “considerable opportunities” on the northern leg.

In an exclusive interview with Building Design, published today, she admitted some early designs put forward by the various consortia working on phase 1 “could have been better” but that her team had helped “turn them around”. “It’s about pushing [the consortia] that extra mile,” she said.

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