From last week's Evening Standard, which I forgot to post at the time:
Plans to turn Luton into a huge four-runway “England airport” are unveiled today as the latest possible solution to the crisis in aviation capacity.
The scheme’s backers claim that, of the capital’s six airports, only Luton has good enough UK-wide links to make it a nationally accessible hub.
The town is next to the M1 and on the high-speed Midlands rail line to St Pancras as well the Thameslink route to central London and the south coast.
London architects Weston Williamson said that if the multi-billion-pound plan went ahead there would also have to be a new road linking the M1 and the A1, as well as a new “Crossrail 2” with a 25-minute journey time to Euston.
We debated this at length a while ago, and if you think through the arguments, Luton (or thereabouts) is the ideal place for an airport.
We can rule out due east and due west of London because the prevailing winds mean that planes have to either fly over central London and/or turn sharply just after take-off or before landing. That leaves north (Luton) and south (Gatwick).
Gatwick is fine for people in London/South East (it's sort of the South East's equivalent of the Humber Bridge) but Luton is much better for the vast majority of the population which lives to the north or west of London, it is close to motorways etc and trains go into London every ten minutes.
According to the article, Stansted would then be in the way of the Luton flight path and would have to be shut down, which is a shame because it's a nice little airport, but hey.
Monday, 29 October 2012
Great minds think alike
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10 comments:
Which is better to develop of the two?
JH, that's a good question, let's do a Fun Online Poll, starting tomorrow.
Will stay loyal to the original Buchanan/Foulness/Maplin/Marinair schemes for an estuary island airport,(only forestalled at the last moment by an incoming Labour Government).Not that its necessarily the best place for take-offs ,(though an emergency landing could come down in the Thames,like that American plane in the Hudson surely)but because an island could serve to bridge the Thames with arms sticking out to form an Outer Thames Barrier with HSR2 coming straight down Eastern England and by-passing London to link up with the the existing Chunnel HSR line and, with the barrier in place, the gradual back-filling of the estuary to provide new land right up tight to London.(Lola won't like this as he very fond of dreary estuaries .Me I'd round off the coastline pretty smooth.)
Luton might be ok. Pretty grim transport links though. The M1 around there is full already .
The main argument against Stansted is apparently that because it is so remote it would be hard to find the workforce to run it.
That would happen with Boris Island as well I imagine.
BE
DBC, surely Boris Island is a complete and utter joke? Does anybody take it seriously?
BQ, it's quicker widening a motorway than building a new one.
BE, yes, Stansted is a bit out of the way, which is good because there are fewer neighbours to complain about the noise, but it's more difficult to get people to work there, it's a more or less impossible problem.
Hardly a joke, the project for a Thames Estuary Airport (see Wikipedia arose out of the Roskill Commission 1970(which favoured Cublington BTW) and the influential minority report of Colin Buchanan who favoured Maplin on Thames Estuary (North Shore).Maplin was at a late stage of commissioning when it was cancelled by the incoming Labour Government of 1974 (on cost/ecological grounds : they were full of Limits to Growth rhetoric,fashionable at the time).
The project was continued by Marinair.Kit Malthouse, big in the London Assembly, took it over.
IMO they should build an island, with or without an airport, for all the reasons given above. Also selling all the land at redundant Heathrow for housing would do a bit of additional good.
The Thames Estuary airport is certainly doable. You need only look at the new Hong Kong International Airport to see what can be done with artificial islands and decent transport links. Of course the cost is another matter. Hong Kong didn't have much choice whereas London does.
However if it were built, I would say that it would be one of the few places in the South-East where a case could be made for it to have an assessed land value of zero, since it would have been effectively worthless "land" before the artificial island was built.
DBC, D, sure they did it in HK but only because they had nowhere else. As to land values, you've got to minus off costs.
So we lose a few hundred acres of farmland round Luton, boo too, value a few million quid, costs of getting all the traffic connections and flood drainage etc in place precisely £ zero. Thames Estuary land, current value nothing, cost of building all the extra roads and stuff £ zillions.
As I believe I've said before,the airport is only part of it: one object is to reclaim a lot of valuable land near London among other objectives.For instance: Schiphol means 'ship hole' because so many ships went down there in what was the Haarlemmer Meer (?), which was then turned into a polder with the same name and then became Amsterdam airport. There is no reason why we can't do the same with the bottom of the Thames which is not at all that far below the surface.Spoil from Crossrail will need dumping and ships regularly go downstream (at night) to dump rubbish.Remember the Bowbell?
Luton is only 18 miles East of Cublington which was rejected back then (at time of Roskill) because inland airports were deemed economically justifiable but environmentally unjustifiable. I would have thought widening the MI through Luton is impossible because its so built up.
One site next to the MI which is sometimes mentioned is Bruntingthorpe an ex USAAF airbase ,where they used to film Top Gear ,hence all the vintage planes knocking about .South of Leicester and near the main railway line ( I think).
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