I have lived with Heathrow Airport almost all my life. My first visit was as a young child, shortly
after the tunnel into the central area was completed, but when, if you turned
right shortly after coming out of the tunnel, you came to a cinder compound with
a few children’s amusements from which the movements of the aircraft – Vickers
Vikings, Airspeed Ambassadors, and Lockheed Constellations, could be watched
from behind nothing more than a 4 foot high wire fence.
I should explain that I was brought up almost directly under
one of the eastern flight paths into Heathrow – indeed my primary school was
directly under that path. Not that it
mattered that much – our lessons were not disturbed by turboprop planes that
came in every few minutes. It was when the early jets started that things got a
bit worse – with the worst of all being the Trident, a British-built plane
unfortunately.
Instead of going off collecting train numbers I could sit in
our back garden, with my father’s old wartime binoculars, and note down plane
numbers. And that, of course, led into the question of where the planes had
come from. When my father retired he got
hold of the airline timetables every few months and made up a schedule that
enabled him to identify exactly where any plane that came over had originated:
it could probably all be sorted easily by computer now, but he did it all by
hand. For my part I used to cycle to Heathrow in
school holidays – starting when I was only about 11 – to watch the planes and
record their numbers, returning home to underline them in the plane-spotters
catalogues. The cycle tunnels into the
airport I used then have been converted to car and taxi lanes – I don’t suppose
anyone cycles to Heathrow Central now.
Living near Heathrow had some interesting social
geographical dimensions to it. Protests
about aircraft noise and campaigns against night flying were launched further
away from the airport than where we lived – in Kew and Richmond. The reason why no one in our street would
have joined such protest movements was simple – a lot of people around us
either worked at Heathrow (a father and two sons three doors from us who were all
fitters for British European Airways (as it then was), or were dependent on the
airport for employment (the Hertz rent-a-car man who lived next door). Even the jobbing plasterer and the jobbing
builder further along got occasional work at Heathrow or at firms connected
with it.
My daughter lives in the house that I was brought up in near
the flight path. Today the planes come
over at 80 second intervals, but since Concorde was taken out of service there
is nothing that interrupts normal conversation.
Family life goes on irrespective of the noise of planes. When I was a child, though, I had
difficulties in getting to sleep in relations’ houses where all was quiet,
without the regular thrum of a plane coming in.
(Throughout this piece I have talked about planes coming in to
land. When planes take off in an
easterly direction they turn off the line before reaching the house: it is only
when they fly in via central London – which they do most of the time because of
the prevailing wind – that they fly over.)
I have been at Heathrow today for a flight to Hong Kong, and
I am actually writing this whilst over Russia on that flight. I have just left Terminal 5 – a construction
that would be unimaginable to anyone standing on that piece of cinder ground
near the north runway in the mid 1950s.
Perhaps because I grew up with Heathrow as a constant presence in my
life it seems quite natural to fly from there.
Many people from Sheffield, where I now live, would rather walk to
Manchester than fly from Heathrow – saying that the airport is chaotic,
crowded, unlovable and to be avoided at all costs. But the UK’s provincial airports such as
Manchester and Birmingham have few long-haul flights (Birmingham virtually
none) and are rapidly becoming the preserve of budget carriers. And whilst it
is certainly possible to fly from both of them to virtually anywhere in the
eastern hemisphere via Dubai or Helsinki, I would much prefer a direct
long-haul flight than changing planes in the middle of the night somewhere that
I don’t want to be (not that I’ve got anything against Helsinki – a lovely
city). British Airways should perhaps be
renamed ‘London Airways’ now since its service for cities other than London is
now virtually non-existent. At one time
or another I have flown from Manchester, Birmingham (or even Sheffield) to
cities as varied as New York, Berlin, Paris, and Düsseldorf: now the only BA
destination from Manchester is London.
I don’t know how many flights I have made in my life –
probably well over 200. But flying still
has an element of romance to it, and there is always a little bit of excitement
in arriving to catch a plane at Heathrow, just as there was for me when I
cycled there to collect plane numbers and watch aircraft from all over the
world when I was a child.
No comments:
Post a Comment