Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Airport wars: why I’m betting on Gatwick

The answer’s far from ‘obvious’ – or ideal – but I’d put a tenner on Gatwick

Easter is a good time to talk about airports — or perhaps a bad time, if you bought your Spectator in the shopping labyrinth that impedes your path to the departure gate after a maddening wait in the security queue, where only a quarter of the scanners are working. I’m with you, and not just in spirit: in fact, that’s me being led away by men with machine guns, after an altercation over the contents of my wash-bag.

It’s a curious fact that no one has ever succeeded in imbuing airport terminals with the romance, dignity and passenger satisfaction quotient of 19th-century railway stations. At best they are soulless, at worst a stress-filled vision of hell. Our future as a trading nation and tourist destination depends upon them, yet we seem incapable of designing a better model, or deciding how best to redevelop existing ones in the interests of growth and efficiency with the least environmental harm. Ministers and business chiefs chant that we must have a ‘hub’ to connect us to otherwise lost cities across Asia and Latin America that are ravenous to do business with us. But no one can agree where to put it, or how to make it human.

Deliverability

This can of nimbyist perils has been kicked around by politicians since the Roskill Commission of 1968 — whose chosen site for a new airport, Cublington near Aylesbury, is as green and pleasant today as it was when villagers defeated the proposal. Its place on the drawing board was taken by Maplin Sands, first of several Thames Estuary non-starters of which the most recent is ‘Boris Island’ — whimsically supported by this column but now effectively ruled out on grounds of cost and bird disturbance by the interim findings of the Airports Commission.

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