Terminal damage

Later this month, Heathrow will celebrate its 50th anniversary. From makeshift beginnings to its present eminence as the world's busiest international airport, it has become a remarkable metropolis in its own right - but at a rapacious cost to the people and villages standing in its way. By Peter Popham. Photographs by Nick Turpin

Green Man Lane in Hatton, a couple of hundred yards east of the end of Heathrow's southern runway. It's amazing: people live here. Pre- War semis with high, pointy gables of dirty stucco, pansies out front, hedges of ragged privet, washing on rotating hoists. An east wind is blowing, so this morning the TriStars and DC-10s and Boeing 737s are taking off into it. They are screaming up behind me, blackening the sky. Up goes the undercarriage, and, once retracted, the doors close underneath it. You can watch it happen; you can see the mechanical detail of how it works. Though presumably, if you lived here, the fascination would soon pass: the planes go over almost exactly every two minutes, without a break.

At 10.43am I am in the car, windows up, about to turn the ignition, when a thunderous crash out of nowhere frightens me out of my skin. Takes me totally unawares. It's of a different order from the others: the noise of catastrophe. Concorde goes over the rooftops (later a press officer from BAA - the airport's authority - tells me emphatically, "I love the noise!") and as it climbs, twin brown plumes of exhaust fan out behind the tail. Seconds later, the street is finely drenched in a sickly shower of the stuff.

Heathrow Airport has been with us, and the people of villages such as Hatton, Sipson, Longford and Harmondsworth, for 50 years. And a very strange presence it is, too, because of the speed and relentlessness with which it has grown - growth that shows no sign of being checked.

Fifty years ago it was an airstrip fringed by a row of phone boxes and a clump of tents. The tents were equipped with armchairs, a bar, a WH Smith's, a desk for sending telegrams, and Elsan toilets. WH Smith - ubiquitous in the terminals today - is perhaps the only element linking us with that distant era. Now Heathrow is four terminals, handling 54 million passengers every year, and straining to build a fifth so it can handle at least 26 million a year more.

The three central terminals are in a constant state of drastic upheaval as they reinvent themselves year after year. The restrained, red brick English modernism of the buildings has practically disappeared under the accretion of tubes, annexes and other stuck-on bits and pieces. Terminal 2 is the latest zone to have undergone a massive face-lift, Sir Richard Rogers's designs rendering the new "Europier" section cool, calm, restrained and utterly quiet. In the gaps between the terminals, work on the Heathrow Express rail terminal - halted last year, when an office building collapsed into a half-built tunnel - is raucously under way.

On 24 May, the airport's birthday, the Queen will, in the words of one bitter Terminal 5 opponent, "be made to come here and open Terminal 2 again". Heathrow is a place that most of us who use it from time to time take for granted; brief spasms of loathing alternate with long periods of complete indifference. For the people living on its fringes, the emotions are mostly the same, with proportions reversed: brief spasms of indifference and long periods of complete loathing. It is a place we see only out of the corners of our eyes, until it is time to use it, when we follow the signs, grit our teeth and get through as fast as we can.

We only see the bits we need to see: Heathrow is revealed to its users on a need-to-know basis. What we usually don't see is that in 50 years that huddle of tents without mains sewage or anything much else has grown into what is in many ways our most characteristic modern city. If Britain in the late Nineties required a monument to its civilisation, this would be the strongest contender. It's our new city square, backdrop to all the most powerful emotions. All the momentous events happen here: babies are born and dumped, smugglers arrested, would-be immigrants ritually humiliated, lovers wrenched apart and united. And its peculiar appropriateness consists in this fact: a monument is what it is in no danger at all of becoming. You couldn't slap a conservation order on anything here; it would wriggle free and metamorphose into something different before you got the chance.

Every human settlement is an organism. But this one, fuelled by the virtually unconstrained power of the market, is a monster out of science fiction, swallowing land and hamlets, continuously re-creating itself, permanently ravenous. It can never get enough: enough land, money, noise, dirt, adrenaline, electricity, organisations, car parks, retail outlets, hotels, people. In this respect, it is the image of us, and of our civilisation.

To see Heathrow's appetite at work now, while Terminal 5 goes through the long public enquiry process, go to the village of Harmondsworth. Mentioned in the Domesday Book, Harmondsworth now finds itself a few hundred yards to the north of the airport's perimeter, squashed between the A4 and the M4 and in the crook of an armpit of the M25. At its nucleus is a pretty, part-Norman parish church, and an ancient pub, the Three Magpies.

Just outside the village, large yellow earth-movers are shifting the gravel and clay. Here, British Airways (BA) is to build its new "combined business centre", a "world-class corporate office complex", as they describe it, comprising six four-storey buildings. But because this is Green Belt land - quaint, but true - BA, by way of what is called "planning gain", are to turn the remaining 225 acres into what they claim will be the biggest new park in Britain this century, as big as London's Regent's Park.

Such munificence and public spirit shows how much the right to build close to Heathrow's perimeter matters to BA: they are willing to spend tens of millions of pounds on the project, quite distinct from the cost of the buildings themselves, in order to obtain it.

There is another theory, widespread among Heathrow's neighbours, who have grown worldly wise through decades of watching the airport expand: many believe that Prospect Park, as the open ground is provisionally named, will in due course be turned into Heathrow's third runway. BA, unsurprisingly, deny that there is a shred of truth in the rumour.

If they wanted to kill the rumour dead, the best way would be to return the excess land, once the park has been fashioned, to local authority ownership. After all, what business does a major airline have running a municipal park? This, however, they decline to do. Those who have lived with Heathrow's appetite mark this and exchange knowing looks, and point out that ten or 20 years into the future, who knows what will happen?

The roof of the Control Tower is the best place to get an idea of the scale of Heathrow. The operation of an airport the size of this one, from air traffic control to driving birds away from the runway or gathering up debris, is of almost unlimited complexity; but in its essentials it is very simple.

There are two runways going from east to west: the northern and the southern. Both are about two-and-a-half miles long - they were lengthened in 1969 to accommodate the first generation of jumbos. Aeroplanes need to take off into the prevailing wind: today, the wind is from the east, and the southern runway is being used for takeoffs, so one after another, at two-minute intervals, the planes are hauling themselves into the air, over the high-gabled semis of Hatton. A queue forms on the taxiway leading to the runway, of planes that are ready to go. Over to the north, meanwhile, at the same sort of interval, the planes are coming in to land. As one lands, three or more are visible behind it. From this perspective, the airport is a colossal but very simple and regular machine.

From here, too, one can see why Heathrow was such an attractive choice for London's first civilian airport: the land is entirely flat as far as the eye can see. "The foundations of Heathrow's place in history were laid 25 million years ago," reads BAA's Look at Life-ish account of the Heathrow story, "when southeast England became submerged under the sea; a flat layer of gravel was deposited 14 miles west of what is now Trafalgar Square, and it was the flatness and the excellent drainage characteristics of the gravel that made Heathrow the perfect site for an airport."

It also, incidentally, made it a perfect site for the fruit and vegetable farms that thrived here for centuries before the airport's arrival, vestiges of which can still be found on the airport's periphery: it is believed that the Cox's Orange Pippin was first propagated and named not far from Terminal 1. But, fortunately for the boffins in charge of Britain's infant aviation industry, the need for a major airport near London to handle long-range aircraft was felt in wartime, when something decisive could readily be done about it. At the end of 1943, a Cabinet committee took the decision that London's new airport after the War should be Heathrow, and six months later plans were disclosed to the local authority, Middlesex County Council. Using emergency wartime powers, the Air Ministry compulsorily purchased 2,800 acres of land, including the hamlet called Heath Row on the site of what is now Terminal 3. A mere week later, work started on building the first runway.

Although the airport was conceived and created under wartime conditions and using emergency powers, it was always anticipated that Heathrow would eventually revert to civilian use. And so it duly transpired, on 1 January, 1946: the nascent airport was still a vast building site when a Lancaster bomber, converted to carry ten passengers (including a BBC reporter) and a ton of mail, hopped its way through Europe and Africa, then across the Atlantic to Buenos Aires, taking a total of 35 hours.

Heathrow's compulsive skin-sloughing was soon on view. The original tents, duckboards (against the mud - so much for the area's great drainage) and fire buckets (to catch rain leaking into the tents) were soon replaced by army surplus concrete prefabs, of which a BAA historian had these kind words to say: "Warm, friendly and bustling, they were in pleasant contrast to the earlier utility accommodation." Five years later, in 1951, construction began on the buildings that still form the nucleus of the airport today.

The Fifties were Heathrow's heyday, when it was still known unequivocally as London Airport, when the first passenger jet, the British Comet (it made its debut in 1952) ruled the skies, and when flights were still so rare that the viewing area was crowded with people waiting patiently, not for minutes but for hours and hours, for flights to arrive or depart.

A middle-aged woman who has lived most of her life close to the airport remembers that, even for the local people, the arrival of a plane was an exciting occurrence, eagerly anticipated. "On Sunday afternoons our idea of an outing was to go to the airport, and wait for the planes to come in."

Back then, Heathrow was small and accessible enough to be really special. It was the most modern sort of theatre: everyone, including the Queen and film stars, entered and left their planes by the movable stairs, so that, from the viewing terrace, the drama of the place unfolded before the eyes of anyone equipped with a good pair of binoculars. The terminal itself was equipped with an American-style self-service restaurant, a shop, even a cinema. Nowhere in the country could you find a more vivid encapsulation of the idea of progress.

But, of course, in the Fifties, the decade of progress, only the odd curmudgeon declined to believe that science and technology were carrying us forward into a golden age when poverty and want would be abolished and all diseases cured. In our simplicity (as it appears now), we were right behind places like Heathrow: this was where our civilisation was headed, give or take a few nasty imponderables such as nuclear war.

Since then, a great gulf has opened up between the boffins, in whom we placed so much faith, and the rest of us. Sir John Egan, chief executive of BAA, wrote last month, "Nowhere is the march of progress more apparent than at Heathrow, where the original wind-blown village of 1946 is such a contrast to today's thriving metropolis - the world's number one international airport." The phrase that jars is "march of progress", because it assumes far more in the way of consent and compliance than we today are prepared to allow. Forty years ago, it could be assumed that the march of progress would carry us all along with it. Today, we know that far too many get flattened under its boots.

Fifty years ago, the wartime government could issue a compulsory purchase order and start work on Heathrow's first runway a week later. Today, given the shrieks and moans of those underfoot, progress's march is rather more halting. In the bowels of the inverted ziggurat that is Heathrow's Ramada Hotel, the public enquiry into the construction of Terminal 5 is shortly to mark its first anniversary.

You may have read about the enquiry in the papers when it first got under way. If you have not heard much about it since, there is a reason: the proceedings have been so slow and soporific as to make dormice of us all. Today, in the large, low-ceilinged Ramada Suite, which can hold an audience of perhaps 200, four members of the public are dotted about. Up at the front, Sheila Cameron, QC, counsel for the 11 (out of a total of 12) adjacent local authorities that oppose the new terminal, is cross- examining David Instone, who has been head of the Transport Policy Unit in the Department of Transport since 1991. "Drone" would be too lively a word to describe the tone of the debate. They are discussing the "origins and role of the government's sustainable development policy", but they have not yet descended from the general to the particular. As the order paper puts it, "Mr Instone's evidence does not seek to argue for or against any particular development proposal, such as Terminal 5."

In the enquiry's first year, two topics out of 12 for consideration have been covered; at that rate, the enquiry would go on for another five years. From now on, however, it is expected to pick up speed, and by this time next year it should be drawing to a close.

It will be the longest public enquiry in British history, longer even than the 340 days of Sizewell B. No one disputes its importance: if the fifth terminal is built, on the site of Perry Oaks sewage treatment plant, a huge area to the west of the Heathrow site, within the perimeter road, BAA estimates that it will increase the number of passengers using the airport, from 54 million to 86 million. The Civil Aviation Authority believes that this figure is an underestimate, and that the true figure will be closer to 100 million. Whichever proves to be correct - and, to judge by Heathrow's growth to date, underestimation is a mistake - it will be the biggest expansion in capacity in the airport's history.

For an airport as hectically busy as this one, it raises all sorts of questions, many of them put in the 12,000 letters of opposition that the enquiry has received. Will the noise not become even more unbearable than it is today? What about the increased risk of accidents? Will there not be chronic log jams on the roads between the airport and central London, now that the plan to broaden the M25 to 14 lanes in the airport's vicinity has been scuppered? How can the airport cope without building an extra runway?

Mike Roberts, managing director of Heathrow, and Des Wilson, Director of Corporate Affairs, are jauntily confident in answering many of these misgivings. As well as getting bigger, they point out, planes are getting quieter and take off at a steeper angle - so in 2016, they maintain, the noise situation will at least be no worse than today, and for some it will be better. Access to the airport should get progressively smoother, with the Heathrow Express (Paddington to Heathrow, 16 minutes) augmented by a much larger network of trains and buses coaxing more and more customers on to public transport. No third runway is required, because planes are getting bigger and fuller, so the existing two runways can be used even more efficiently than at present. According to their projections, a new runway will be needed in southeast England by 2010 - but they believe that a third runway at Heathrow, which would involve buying and demolishing some 3,000 homes, would be politically and environmentally unacceptable. Cross their hearts and hope to die, there is no such secret plan.

But whatever the truth of these points, Sir John Egan's march of progress has many adversaries to flatten on its way to the beckoning, sunlit future. Rita Pearce is one of them. A resident of the village of Longford, on the airport's northern boundary, she is one of the few resisters to attend the enquiry every day. She has lived close to the airport all her life, and her experience is of relentlessly worsening living conditions.

"Until 15 years ago, planes went over every three to four minutes, which meant that at least you could have a short conversation in the garden before you were interrupted," she says. "But now there is no break: the long-haul flights start streaming in from 3.30am, and after that it's nonstop all day. There are 16 scheduled night flights; at other times. they wake you up testing the engines. You're lucky if you can get two to three hours' solid sleep a night. And then there's the constant smell of the fumes. If you're out in the garden on a Sunday, your eyes are streaming.

"We've never been against Heathrow in the past; we want to be good neighbours. But it's getting intolerable. With Terminal 5, they're just sticking two fingers up at us. Our biggest fear is that in the end they will need a new runway."

As we have seen, BAA deny this firmly, but long experience of the airport's relentless growth has rendered many residents deeply sceptical about the reassurances they are given. After all, in ten or 20 years it is a fair bet that progress will still be on the march.

But down in the terminally blighted village of Hatton, east of the southern runway, an air of canny resignation prevails in the Green Man, a half- timbered pub, which has a hidey-hole where highwaymen are reputed to have taken refuge, an air of canny resignation prevails. Terry Burnham, bearded, wrinkled and sun-weathered, thinks he knows the score. I find him minding his animals - cows, ponies, geese - on a strip of grassland adorned with tumbledown corrugated iron structures, across a busy road from the airport.

"I've lived here all me life," he says, with a country burr. "The airport's all right: we don't bother them and they don't bother us. The planes don't worry the animals one bit. All this grass will be gone before long - they'll get it in the end. Look at the way the place has grown. My father used to plough where the runway is."

Burnham is frankly cynical about the public enquiry. "That's a lot of tommyrot," he says, with a broad, crafty smile. "They're already building Terminal 5 up at Harmondsworth, you mark my words. A lot of people who used to live there have sold out well. I know one bloke who sold out to BA for half a million. They're not paying that sort of money if they don't mean to do something with the land."

"What about you?" I asked him. "Do you hope to sell out for a good price, too?"

"It's not my land, I'm only renting it," he said. "But I hope I'll get a nice golden handshake for going quietly, one of these days. Then I can move the animals out somewhere quieter, before I die"