Despite it being 9am on a Friday morning, Ashford International Station is remarkably quiet. The escalators are switched off, the toilets are closed. The bureau de change looks permanently shuttered and the car park has hundreds of spaces.
You may be able to get a £4.50 croque monsieur at the empty station cafe, but that’s as close as you’ll get to Paris. The Eurostar hasn’t stopped here since 2020 and many people in Kent aren’t happy about it.
“It’s frustrating to say the least,” says Tudor Price, chief executive of Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce. “The Eurostar was one of the major investment pulls for Kent and we had businesses set up here for that reason. We carved up huge swathes of the Kent countryside for HS1.
We have hotels built in this part of town based on that connectivity. We feel very let down, like the arrangement has been reneged on.” The first service stopped at Ashford International in January 1996 – a year after cross-Channel rail services started in Waterloo – and at one point there were around a dozen services to mainland Europe a day.
But the completion of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link from St Pancras in 2007 (and subsequent closure of services from Waterloo) meant Ashford and Ebbsfleet services were halved, or completely dropped. Not even a £10 million project to update the platforms and signalling systems at Ashford in 2018 could attract new trains and in 2020, due to the pandemic, all international services from Ashford and Ebb.