Today I photographed a demonstration against the continuing expansion of London Heathrow, certainly one of the worst located airports in the developed world.
I grew up under its flightpath. In my back garden in Hounslow I would imagine myself reaching up and touching the planes as they passed overhead. It wouldn’t have needed very long arms. I dreamed (or nightmared) of them passing over in flames (though sometime it was true) and jumping across the sky as flaming fragments.
Heathrow was established by deception – as a miltary airstrip for which there was no military purpose. It has grown by lies. The third terminal was all the airport would ever want, but as soon as planning permission was obtained, in went the application for a fourth. Of course that would be enough. But somehow we have a fifth, and the sixth will soon be with us unless we stop the madness.
The quiet Middlesex villages I cycled through as a child – and by the time I was ten I was roaming through them all on my bicycle and further afield – are either already gone or under threat. Longford, Sipson, Harlington, Harmondsworth and more.
Harmondsworth, 2003
Look at the placard at the right of the picture. Here is a detail from another frame that states clearly what the BAA, responsible for Heathrow, promised about the possibility of a third runway there:
Rule out third runway say BAA
I hope today’s demonstration – in which over 3000 people gave a resounding ‘No’ to the idea of a third runway will cause even our un-green government to think again. It has been clear to anyone who took a careful and balanced view that Heathrow was in the wrong place since the 1950s – if not before. Government after government has refused to grasp the nettle and start to develop another London airport on a more suitable site. We now have a different situation, with increasing oil prices as we go past ‘peak oil’ as well as an much greater appreciation of the catastrophe approaching through climate change. From every point of view – even a strict economic one that ignores environmental issues – Heathrow needs to shrink rather than expand.
I’ll post some of my own pictures of today’s demonstration shortly. For the moment you can see a few my pictures from the march from Sipson to Harmondsworth in June 2003, and you can also see the BBC’s video coverage of the event, in which I appear rather too prominently, immediately after the huge ‘NO’, taken from a cherry picker, as a photographer in a blue check shirt, first walking towards the camera and then walking back into the frame to take another picture.
