The trouble with Heathrow airport

I begin my day waiting for the bus that runs between Heathrow’s main hotels and its four terminals, and talking to Derek and Anne Hodge.

Having flown the day before from Sydney and spent the night at one of the airport’s three Holiday Inns, they are en route to Cork, then Southampton, and then for a final fortnight in Spain.
They are expats who relocated to Australia 22 years ago; with their golf clubs and pile of upmarket luggage, they have the comfortable air of people whose retirement has turned out very nicely indeed.
Before they set off, however, their nerves were jangled by news from the old world. On news bulletins on their adopted country’s Channel 10, they tell me, warnings have recently been sounded about the decline of Britain’s biggest airport, and a protest camp that has pitched up close by. “The report was on TV the day before we left,” says Anne. “They said Heathrow was the worst airport in the world, and using it was more stressful than a divorce.”
And how has it been for them? “It wasn’t bad yesterday,” says her husband. “But it isn’t half grubby. It really does look dirty. If you compare it with other airports – Sydney, say, or Bangkok – it’s really not very good. When you come here, being British by birth, you really do think, ‘I’d like to be prouder of this.’”
Having picked us up from the hotel, the bus wends its way through a crowded landscape, all box-like architecture and towering adverts.
According to an incongruous alliance of people who have been recently raising their voices, these 4.6 square miles are now among the most unpleasant places in Britain.
The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone recently claimed that Heathrow “shames London” and offers “appalling conditions” in which passengers are effectively kept prisoner in a “ghastly shopping mall”.
Design guru Sir Terence Conran thinks the airport has become a “really horrible place”.
The essential problem, according to some people, is the domination of the UK’s airports by BAA – once known as the British Airports Authority, privatised in 1987, now owned by the giant Spanish corporation Ferrovial, and accused of behaving with all the arrogance of the archetypal private monopoly.
In March, the UK’s Office of Fair Trading referred BAA to the Competition Commission; as the latter puts its report together, plenty of voices have been claiming that Heathrow should be taken out of BAA’s portfolio.
The past few weeks, meanwhile, have seen events – thanks to ubiquitous media coverage, now bundled up into one of the biggest stories of the summer – that have only worsened Heathrow’s troubles.
In early August, having got wind of a protest camp’s imminent arrival, BAA applied for a surreally wide-ranging injunction, focused on banning protest from an area far wider than the airport.
Any half-decent PR adviser would surely have predicted the result: BAA received acres of bad press, and the camp was propelled into the national consciousness. And then, the high court granted an altogether more limited injunction than BAA was after, and, with an air of jubilation, the camp’s organisers said that their plans remained unchanged.
They pitched up on land that may eventually be concreted over by a runway that would increase the airport’s annual flight numbers from 480,000 to more than 700,000. Largely populated by young enrages, the camp was also buoyed by the quiet support of rather older local people, many of whom have spent decades watching Heathrow eat into the surrounding landscape. These days, they tend to mention one place more than any other: Sipson, the village that a third runway would wipe from the map.
Leaving aside the eco-protesters, there are not many lines to be drawn between Heathrow’s local opponents and the politicians and business leaders – and passengers – who bemoan its currently shabby state. After all, the former want any plans for Heathrow’s expansion to be abandoned, while many of the latter think its refurbishment and growth should only be accelerated.
Underlying both their arguments, however, is Heathrow’s essential problem. It boils down to this: why is one of the world’s busiest airports and its surrounding netherworld located 15 miles from London, on a site chosen during the second world war, now boxed in by housing, and expanded and altered over 60 years with precious little strategic vision?
You only need travel abroad to grasp what’s wrong: while so many of the world’s airports now offer acres of space, futuristic flash and carefully designed passenger comfort, Heathrow has the distinct air of a project made up as people went along. It is, in effect, a very British botch-up.
Once I’ve been dropped off at terminal three, my morning-long tour of Heathrow begins in a room known as the “Star Centre”, where banks of plasma screens flash up CCTV pictures of every corner of the airport.
This morning, particular attention is being paid to the tunnel that takes 55,000 cars a day between the terminals, and rumours about a possible disruptive action involving a gang of cyclists who are reported to have just set off from London (as it turns out, they don’t show up). In between explaining his job, Greg Ward, Heathrow’s burly operations director, issues the odd dismissive aside about what he called ‘Camp Climate’.
Twenty minutes later, I am sitting in a compact corporate meeting room with Mark Bullock, the managing director of BAA’s Heathrow operation, promoted recently to being its public face after the departure of its chief executive Tony Douglas, who was last heard claiming that Heathrow was “bursting at the seams”.
The past few months, I suggest, must have been trying, to say the least. “What I know is, I inherited – if I can use that phrase – an airport that’s handling 68 million passengers and it was designed for 45 million,” he says. “We’ve got the two busiest runways in the world. So it’s always going to be difficult to manage an operation like that.”
Mr Bullock says that Heathrow “isn’t fixed, but it’s moving in the right direction”. (At BAA’s HQ, tea is served in “Making Heathrow Great” mugs.) Like many of his colleagues, he claims that queues to pass through security checks now take no longer than 10 minutes – and bemoans the tendency of Heathrow’s detractors to blame problems at check-in, passport control and baggage reclaim on BAA, when they are the chief responsibility of airlines and, in the latter case, the government’s Border and Immigration Agency.
When it comes to the camp, he defends the attempted injunction but didn’t its surreally wide terms hand the protesters a PR gift? “The injunction needed to be quite widely worded,” he says, “because these people don’t stand up and say, ‘I’m one of the people who’s going to take direct action.’ You can’t pin them down.”
Eventually, we get on to the subject of the third runway. An idea that was first mooted in the 1940s, it was decisively placed on the agenda in late 2003, when the government announced its support for new runways at Heathrow and Stansted (and, just to really inflame environmentalists, Birmingham and Edinburgh). A consultation process will begin this month; a public inquiry is expected to start in 2008. As late as 2001, BAA claimed that it “would urge the government to rule out any additional runway at Heathrow”, though it has now done a volte-face and decided to support the plan, which has only heightened local anger.
“It’s very difficult, isn’t it?” says Mr Bullock. “You’ve got to sympathise with people whose homes are in that area, which if it goes ahead, will be under a runway. That’s why the consultation around the third runway needs to balance the social benefits of flying, the economic benefits to London and the UK of this hub airport, the climate impact, and the impact on individuals.”
Even with three runways, Heathrow could still lag behind many of its international competitors. Despite handling 10 million fewer passengers a year, Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airport has four runways; Amsterdam’s Schiphol is 20 million behind, and it has six. In the towns and villages that nudge Heathrow’s perimeter, there are suspicions that once a third runway is built, Heathrow will then expand again.
My tour of Heathrow finishes with the building that is BAA’s pride and joy. On the former site of a sewage works, just to the east of the central knot of buildings that contains terminals one, two and three, work is about to finish on terminal five.
Designed by Richard Rogers, it will open in March next year to handle all the airport’s British Airways flights, and boost Heathrow’s passenger capacity by up to 25 million, thus relieving a good deal of the pressure that currently burdens the airport. It is a spectacular place, lit up by skylights that form huge arcs, and capped at one end by a vast window that looks out on Heathrow’s runways. Once you have left the arrivals area, you are confronted with a very un-Heathrow sight: an outdoor piazza, replete with lines of trees.
For some people, unfortunately, the promise of a gleaming future rings rather hollow. Back in the existing terminal three, having flown into Stansted from Ireland, 41-year-old Jack Fitzsimons is en route to Mauritius. He has arrived at Heathrow eight hours early. “This place is just chaotic,” he says. “It’s terrible. I used terminal three about a month ago, and it was just overwhelmed. I think of Heathrow as a nuisance airport.”