Sir Peter Hall: Yes, we should build a new airport in the sea

Monday, 27 October 2008

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Heathrow was a wartime mistake that London has lived to regret. When putting an airfield due west of London to allow Spitfires to respond to a Luftwaffe attack, no one thought about aircraft noise: we'd invented the jet plane, but few people had heard one.

Six decades later, Heathrow's noise contours are not its only problem. Successive capacity crises have produced successive short-term patches, in the form of five terminals scattered around the field. Heathrow works badly and projects a terrible public face. Nor could it be otherwise: with 67,000 passengers a year on only two parallel runways, Heathrow's owners are trying to manage the unmanageable. A third runway and a sixth terminal will just make matters progressively worse.

City after city, across the world, have faced a similar dilemma. Airports run out of space, and enlarging them proves impossible logistically or environmentally. Starting with New York International Airport (now JFK) in 1948, through to Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok in 1998, 17 major cities have built new airports in locations offering room to grow. Some, like New York at La Guardia, have retained the old airport for shorter-haul flights; others, like Hong Kong's hair-raising city-centre airport, have been closed.

With Heathrow, we've time to consider both options. But we haven't any time at all to make the basic decision to build a real airport to meet the needs of a world city. There's only one location that can provide for future growth and minimise the impact on people. Like JFK, like Hong Kong, London should have a waterside airport. The Thames estuary, linked to the Eurostar serving short-haul European destinations, can provide the location for a model airport that will make Londoners proud.

Professor Sir Peter Hall is the president of the Town and Country Planning Association