Development of the Camden Highline is pausing

 The Camden Highline team has announced that work on the project is pausing with immediate effect. This is due to rising costs and a challenging fundraising environment, which has impacted many charities, community organisations and public bodies. 

Over the last 10 years, the project has already created long-lasting value in developing a bold design vision and creating a community support network that brought together residents, businesses, volunteers, funders, landowners, and designers. This has helped many people look again at a piece of Camden that was hidden in plain sight. Through Tracking the Heritage, local young people have helped uncover and share Camden’s industrial past, creating walking tours, school workshops, and a physical heritage trail for Camden Town.

The team was built around the ambition to transform a disused railway viaduct into a new local park, garden walk, and wildlife corridor. However, over the last five years, the UK has experienced a series of sustained economic shocks, with construction costs in particular rising well above general inflation. Until now, these pressures have been factored into the project’s modelling, but the emerging 2026 energy shock represents a further step change.

These same shocks have also affected the wider funding environment. Rising living costs, higher operating costs and increased pressure on charities, public bodies and other partners have reduced the capacity available for discretionary capital projects, as support is increasingly focused on essential and statutory services. Taken together, rising costs and reduced funding capacity mean the project is no longer viable in the present economic climate.

Simon Pitkeathley, Chief Executive of the Camden Highline, said: 

“To the thousands of people who joined our walking tours, the hundreds who supported our planning application, the 1,200 donors, the 530 schoolchildren who took part in our workshops, and the many members of our team and volunteer squad over the past decade, we are truly grateful and deeply sorry. Despite your support, and the outstanding advice and commitment of experts across many fields, this extraordinarily ambitious challenge has, for now, proved a stretch too far.

“Green infrastructure in cities matters. Finding space for it is rare. And battling through the treacle to make projects like this happen is difficult, lengthy, and expensive. Which is why today’s announcement is so painful to make.”

Richard Terry, Chair of the Camden Highline Trustees, said:

“The work is not lost. The planning, creativity and imagination that brought the Camden Highline this far will be carefully preserved by the trustees, so that whether it is us or others who one day pick up the mantle again, the project’s achievements can be carried forward for the future.

“It is, in that sense, a time capsule: a record of what has been imagined, designed and built in partnership with the community, waiting to be reawakened when the time and conditions are right once more.”