Posts Tagged ‘London airport’

Heathrow Villages fight for survival – 2015

Saturday, April 12th, 2025

Heathrow Villages fight for survival: On Sunday 12th April 2015 in the run up to the 2015 General Election, campaigners launched a renewed fight against the expansion of Heathrow which threatens to swallow up much of the area, showing again the local determination to protect its historic community against a third runway.

Heathrow Villages fight for survival - 2015

As a fairly local resident although on the other side of Heathrow I’d been involved in the successful campaign a dozen years earlier against the expansion, which had eventually convinced all political parties that expansion at Heathrow was politically impossible. And when the 2010 election put a Tory Lib-Dem coalition into power plans were cancelled as the Lib-Dems had always strongly opposed them.

Heathrow Villages fight for survival - 2015
Datchet Border Morris in the Great Barn

But Heathrow had not taken NO for an answer and had continued to spend a considerable amount lobbying for it, including setting up a heavily funded PR organisation called ‘Back Heathrow’ to come up with spurious survey results suggesting local backing for expansion.

Heathrow Villages fight for survival - 2015

In 2012 the coalition government set up an Airports Commission led by Sir Howard Davies who had held many leading roles as an economist for both governments and private companies and who when appointed resigned from his roles as an adviser to GIC Private Limited, formerly known as Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, a part owner of Heathrow.

Heathrow Villages fight for survival - 2015

Officially the commission’s role was to consider how the UK could “maintain its status as an international hub for aviation and immediate actions to improve the use of existing runway capacity in the next 5 years” but unofficially it was designed to produce a political consensus in its final report in Summer 2015 that would put Heathrow expansion back on track.

The Polar Bears brought their banner ‘Any new runway is Plane Stupid’

In October 2016 the Tories under Theresa May made a third runway and a new terminal a central Government policy, and in June 2018 the House of Commons voted by a large majority in favour, despite the opposition or abstention of most London MPs.

Clifford Dixon (UKIP), Pearl Lewis (Conservative), John McDonnell (Labour) and Alick Munro (Green)

The Supreme Court in 2020 ruled the government’s decision had been unlawful as they had not taken their committments to climate change under the Paris agreement into account. The government then accepted the judgement, but Heathrow appealed and won, with the ban being lifted.

John Stewart of HACAN (Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise)

However the plans have so far not gone ahead, in part because governments have not agreed to pick up the huge infrastructure costs around the airport that would be required and that Heathrow were unwilling to finance.

A war veteran plants a tree on the recreation ground against Heathrow expansion

When the right-wing led Labour government came to power in 2024, they immediately set about making changes to the planning process that would enable developments like Heathrow to go ahead with little or no proper examination and inquiries. And in January 2025 they “confirmed it was the new Labour government’s plan to proceed with a third runway within the current parliamentary term.”

However the arguments against expansion continue to grow in strength, particularly on environmental grounds and the Trump-initiated slump in world trade seems likely to damage the economic arguments for expansion as well as increase the already huge costs of the project. So it still seems unlikely that it will happen, and certainly not by the “projected completion date around 2040.”

You can read more about the activities in Harmondsworth around the village centre back in April 2015 on My London Diary and see the strength of the local opposition back then. There were Morris Dancers performing outside the village pubs and inside the incredible Grade I listed Great Barn and a rally with the Plane Stupid polar bear, speeches from the general election candidates and protesters on what would be the new Heathrow boundary in the village centre.

Heathrow has of course promised the Great Barn would be protected along with the fine part 12th Century Parish Church, but they would not be the same without their context.

Heathrow represents a huge failure by successive governments over many years to set up a new major airport for London at some more suitable location. Even when opened as a civil airport in 1946 it was not a particularly suitable location, though when relatively small and quiet aircraft such as the DC3 were in use it was not a great problem. But once these began to be replaced by larger noisier and more polluting jets and passenger numbers and traffic in the surrounding area shot up the need to close it and move to a new location was clear. Heathrow’s answer was always to expand and make the problems worse, building new terminals (and actually closing runways that had become too short for the newer aircraft.) Heathrow should have been closed down years ago – and would have been a great site for a new town.

Heathrow Villages fight for survival.


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Any New Runway Is Plane Stupid!

Monday, April 12th, 2021

On a day when some of our Covid restrictions are being eased and when more people are apparently thinking about overseas holidays, it’s perhaps appropriate to think about the impact of flying on the future of our planet and the need to curb the exponential growth of air travel, particularly by the increasing number of ‘frequent flyers’. Personally I signed the Flight Free UK pledge not to fly in 2020 – and events later made that easy to keep – and I’ve signed up again for 2021.

Back in April 12th 2015 I spent a pleasant day in Harmondsworth, where a day of action was taking place against the revived plans for a third long runway for Heathrow Airport. A few years earlier I’d covered the local celebrations in neighbouring Sipson after building the third runway had been ruled out because of its environmental impact.

Of course nothing has changed to lessen that environmental impact, but years of continued lobbying on a grand scale, including setting up a fake PR organisation with spurious surveys – and a short-sighted and biased commission to expand aviation in the UK led the government to put the runway back on the table again, despite the growing awareness of the need to urgently tackle the environmental crisis which the planet is currently rushing headlong into.

Harmondsworth is one of the Middlesex villages surrounding what in pre-war days had been the village of Heath Row, full of orchards and market gardens, that I cycled around in my youth in the 1950s, when the airport was smaller and less obtrusive with many less flights and those mainly be smaller and quieter aircraft. Back then it was possible to enjoy the peace and quiet and largely rural nature of the area, even in those places such as Longford and Colnbrook directly under the flightpath. Although the Comet began to change things so far as noise was concerned it was only really around 1960 with the widespread use of the Boeing 707 that peace was definitively shattered.

Harmondsworth is still very much a village, a small place on the edge of the River Colne, with no through traffic in its centre which has a small village green, two pubs, a fine church and the Grade I listed Great Barn, the largest medieval barn in England to have survived largely and remarkably intact – and was recently saved from dereliction by a local campaign which led to its purchase and restoration by English Heritage in 2011.

It was good to be able to visit the barn again – volunteers now keep it open on selected days – and to be able to wander through what John Betjeman described as “The Cathedral of Middlesex”. Later the Datchet Border Morris performed in the barn, and also outside the pub and in the recreation ground where a tree was planted. The Morris dancers I think give a greater sense of its scale.

Local politicians including John McDonnell who has been the area’s MP since 1997, but also all but one of the candidates (except one) standing for the seat in the then forthcoming election came along to speak at the rally on the airport’s proposed new boundary, just a few yards south of the village green – and including most of the housing in the village.

The one missing candidate also supported the rally and opposed airport expansion but there had been a mix-up over dates which made him miss the event. As Labour, the UKIP, Green and Conservative candidates all spoke to oppose any airport expansion, as did several local residents, and campaigner John Stewart of HACAN, and the five polar bears who had recently protested inside one of the Heathrow terminals came along with their banner ‘Any New Runway Is Plane Stupid‘.

Heathrow Villages fight for survival


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.


Hoo Dec 28th 2002

Monday, December 28th, 2020

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.

Higham
Shornmead Fort
 Thames path at Cliffe
Thames at Cliffe
Creek at Cliffe
Cliffe
Cliffe churchyard
Near Cliffe
Near Cliffe
Near Cliffe
Near Cliffe
Near Cliffe
Higham
Higham station

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.