Kevan James: It took minsterial sleight-of-hand to get Heathrow built – expanding it will take similar skill | Conservative Home

Kevan James is a freelance journalist, author and photographer, commentating on commercial aviation, social affairs and is editor at KJM Today.

Most people tend to view airports with a jaundiced eye, understandably perhaps, and consider the terminal as a place through which to pass as rapidly as possible. In today’s world, often one uses vast, identikit buildings before boarding identikit aircraft, spending too long in a narrow seat before being decanted into another vast, identikit building at journey’s end.

‘Get in, get on, fly, get off and get out’ is the mantra. Airports today can be aversive places.

One aspect to airports that many never really realise is that their design or redesign, the building or rebuilding of them is indelibly intertwined with politics and the games of the governments of the day. And nowhere is this truer than the UK’s only ‘hub’ airport, London Heathrow.

Heathrow was the brainchild of Harold Balfour, Conservative MP for the Isle of Thanet (1929-1944) who served under Winston Churchill in the war time coalition as Under Secretary of State for Air (1938-1944).

Balfour believed a large (and he meant large – the original plan, shown below, had nine runways) new civil airport would be needed after hostilities ended but also knew that such a project would not get the go-ahead while there was a war on. Indulging in some sleight of hand, he presented a proposal to the government for a big new RAF base close to London for transportation of men and materials to the Far East for the war against Japan and the idea was approved.

Balfour had already examined various sites and found only one that ticked every box. The area was bordered to the north by the Bath Road and to the southwest by the Great South West Road from London to Staines. In the 13th Century, King Henry III had much of the forest either side of the road cleared, creating Hounslow Heath – the first example of political interest in the area. Along the southern boundary lay the Duke of Northumberland’s River and on the west, Perry Oaks farm.

In the centre of the site a row of houses existed, facing the heath. Unsurprisingly the road that served them was called Heath Row Road as it ran along the edge of the heath. A small airfield already existed close to the houses and there was next to nothing anywhere else. The airfield was owned by the Fairey Aviation Company and has often been named as the ‘original’ Heathrow but it never was – merely a test airfield.

The rest of the land was largely agricultural, owned by the Heath Row Hall farm, Perrots farm, and the Perry Oaks farm, purchased in 1931 by Middlesex County Council for a sewage works, which opened in 1935. Using wartime powers, the government requisitioned the entirety of the area and included a large portion of land north of the Bath Road, bordered to the west by Harmondsworth and on the east by Harlington. Right in the middle of this land was, and still is, the village of Sipson.

In 1944 the Ministry for Civil Aviation came into being, headed by Lord Swinton, with Balfour departing to become Resident Minister in West Africa, and work began on what was supposed to be an RAF base.

With the end of hostilities in the Far East there was no longer a credible role for the new base so it became – as Harold Balfour intended – a new civil airport for London. The government appointed a committee to decide how best to convert a standard RAF triangle of runways, by now almost complete, into a civilian airport. Despite still being built, the airport opened on May 31, 1946.

It has been pondered on by one committee or another ever since. On top of that, never has there been a time during its entire existence that building, or rebuilding work, has not been going on somewhere within its perimeter, with much of it delayed by planning issues, protests and plain old government interference.

Heathrow today occupies almost the same space as it did when the land was originally requisitioned. The only expansion has been to the west, over the land formerly occupied by the Perry Oaks Sewage works. That land is now the site of Terminal 5, home to British Airways and it is possibly the ultimate example of how to hold up infrastructure development in the United Kingdom (it took sixteen years).

Terminal 5 was announced in May 1992 and finally opened for business on March 27, 2008. The years in between were spent planning, enquiring, inquiring, protesting and discussing. So doing is a British national pastime. We excel at it. Heathrow’s history has been peppered with similar examples; so too has transport generally (HS2 being one).

We now, of course, have the ongoing saga of what is known as the third runway. Yet to begin with, the airport had six… Not only that but the land north of the Bath Road is still largely empty, left so for the airport to expand into. Why hasn’t it?

The villagers of Sipson, which sits right in the centre, have been living with the possibility for nearly eighty years but in December 1952 it was announced by Alan Lennox-Boyd, then Minister for Civil Aviation, that the original plan to build three extra runways on the land would not proceed as they were not thought to be necessary.

In other words, it would cost too much and no politician wanted to risk losing votes over airport expansion, particularly by shoving people out of their homes when there was a shortage of housing (decades later there is still a shortage, and people will still have to move). Yet had those runways been built, the furore over today’s runway plans would never have arisen.

Heathrow’s two remaining runways, running east to west, are two of those originally constructed as the supposed RAF airfield was redeveloped. The new runway – if it is ever built – will lie in part on the land north of the Bath Road, but stops short of Sipson, at its eastern end.

The other end, however, slices Harmondsworth in two (although the most notable landmark, the village’s Tithe barn, is further north and will not be affected).

The runway was approved by Gordon Brown’s government, disavowed by David Cameron’s, and re-approved by Theresa May’s. Boris Johnson’s threat to lie down in front of the bulldozers apparently still holds good, and the political games go on as they have done for over eighty years.

But whatever the end result, whether it’s a completely new airport, an expanded old one or for that matter a railway or anything else, somebody will be inconvenienced.

Heathrow was, for much of its time, the busiest international airport in the world – that honour now is held by Dubai. Other countries, including those in Europe, have recognised the benefits of aviation and of being linked around the globe.

The United Kingdom needs to make up its mind what it wants to be. It can be a place where innovation flourishes, a country to visit and do business with or it can sit on the side lines and watch as the rest of the world speeds by.