Back in 2002 the idea of expanding the UK’s airport capacity was under serious consideration and living near Heathrow we were concerned and campaigning against the building of yet another runway at an airport that even then was seriously past its best-before date. Not just because of local considerations but also because of the environmental threat posed by the expansion of air traffic.
It was a fight we won – and celebrated winning in 2010, only to have it put back on the table a couple of years later with a biased report, then taken off again by a court ruling. More recently this court decision has been put aside by what looks rather like a legal fudge, but in the current climate – and more importantly the impending climate catastrophe any expansion seems totally unthinkable.
Back in 2002, there were other proposals for increasing air traffic, some more batty than others, also being put on the table, and one was for an airport on the Hoo peninsula in North Kent. We decided to go and take a look at the area as our long family after-Christmas walk. It was around 15 years since I’d photographed there and none of the others knew it.
Here’s my account written in 2002 (when I was still suffering from a shortage of capital letters) and all the pictures I posted on My London Diary then.
“we walked off some of christmas on the 28th, taking a look around Cliffe, proposed site for a new London airport. Probably not a serious proposition, just put up so that at some point the civil aviation lobby can say, ‘as we can’t possibly build at Cliffe, we will have to have another runway at Heathrow, and yet another terminal/vast shopping centre … Its long past time that we made airlines pay fuel duties and vat and tried actively to cut the growth in air travel, an incredibly wasteful method of transport with with vast subsidies that distort the world economy.
These pictures were among the first that I took with my first serious digital camera, a 6Mp Nikon D100 DSLR, which I had got only a couple of weeks earlier. I’m not sure why I didn’t post more of the roughly 100 pictures I took, or for that matter why I chose these particular group other than that some of them have posters opposing an airport being built here.
At the time I only had one Nikon fit lens, a mid range zoom, I think something like a 24-80mm, which, given the DX format sensor gave the equivalent of 36-120mm.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
