Airport History - Heathrow Airport Car Parking from SkyParkSecure
History of Heathrow Airport
INTRODUCTION
Question: What do an army surplus tent, Druid priests, a romantic film, a conniving Minister, a record-breaking gold robbery and a sludge works have in common?
Answer: They’re all in the history of London Heathrow Airport!
London Heathrow Airport is the world’s busiest international airport. Located in the London Borough of Hillingdon in the west of London, it is the UK’s largest airport and handles 64 million passengers every year. But it wasn’t always so busy…
The 1930s…
In the 1930s, London Heathrow Airport was a small grass airfield known as the Great Western Aerodrome. The Great Western Aerodrome was used for test flying. It was owned by the Fairey company. London's passenger flights used nearby airfields at Heston and Hanworth Park.
The Great Western Aerodrome was later renamed London Airport, then London Heathrow Airport. There remains some controversy over the origin of the name Heathrow; was it named after PM Edward Heath, or Judge John Heath, or the ancient hamlet Heath Row, which sat where Terminal 3 is today? Heath Row was destroyed when the airport was built, along with a second hamlet called Perry Oaks. Iron Age and Roman sites were also destroyed and buried under concrete.
The 1940s…
The first mention of the airport in Air Ministry files is in 1943. The Air Ministry had to change its Heathrow plans when it realised the Perry Oaks sludge works was in the way. But bizarrely, the Ministry told Middlesex County Council to keep searching for a place to relocate the sludge works. The Council never found one; the sludge works is still there today, at least until a fifth terminal is built at London Heathrow Airport.
Development on London Heathrow Airport began in June 1944 as the first V-1 attacks rained down on the London area, one actually exploding nearby in Longford on 13 th June 1944. Stage One of the construction was incomplete when the airport was transferred to the Ministry of Civil Aviation on 1st January 1946. The RAF never used the airport, and later built bases at Lynham and Brize Norton .
Controversy abounds in the history of London Heathrow Airport. The usual story is that the Air Ministry genuinely needed London Heathrow Airport for a wartime Royal Air Force base; however, some sources say this was the Government’s lie to justify its claim on the land. Either way, the war ended before the project was done and London needed a large airport with modern equipment. The unfinished Heathrow site was very suitable, and one runway was already equipped for use. Many historians have argued that the Government wanted Heathrow as a national commercial airport all along, but since Britain was still at war, the Government concocted an elaborate lie that they were using it for the RAF. This allowed them to claim the land and prevented public criticism that the war effort was being sidetracked.
In any case, the Ministry of Civil Aviation took over the airport in 1946 and erected a tent to use as a terminal, and welcomed the new London Heathrow Airport’s first passengers.
Heathrow Airport in 1946
London Heathrow Airport opened for business on 31 st May 1946, replacing Croydon Airport and London's Heston and Hanworth Park aerodromes. In 1946 London Heathrow Airport w as a tiny makeshift village with just one terminal – an army surplus tent with a bar, a few telephones and a small post office. Passengers would hand in their boarding cards at the tent before walking to the aeroplanes.
London Heathrow A irport ’s firstofficial flight was a British South American Airways Lancastrian aircraft which took off from LondonHeathrow for Buenos Aires via Lisbon. Critics have said that this flight was chiefly made to garner publicity and support for the Government’s new civil airport, and to quiet public indignation that the Government was building a commercial airport instead of concentrating on the war effort.
In Heathrow’s early years, only a few airlines flew from the airport. Heathrow initially boasted about 9,000 flights per year, to a mere 18 destinations.
Passengers in the 1940s could have a quiet drink while they waited (providing there were no heavy winds!)
Today, passengers using Terminal 4 will find fascinating pictures, murals and photos of London Heathrow Airport in its early days.
By 1947 Heathrow had three runways. These old runways were built for piston-engined planes. They were short and criss-crossed to allow flights in all kinds of winds. Work on a further three runways was underway but these were later abandoned as unnecessary. Some say that work on these runways was started because the Air Ministry wanted to maintain their lie that Heathrow was meant to be a military air base.
The 1948 Sabena Air Crash Disaster was the first major tragedy at London Heathrow Airport. At 9 pm on March 2nd, in thick fog, a Sabena Airlines DC3 crashed on landing at London Heathrow Airport. Of the 22 passengers and crew, only three survived: Brigadier Otho William Nicholson (an MP from 1924 to 1932), Christopher Roberts of Hertfordshire and Captain Jan Oles of the Polish Resettlement Corps.
The 1950s…
The 1950s began with the abandonment of the tent and the building of a new, permanent terminal in the central area of London Heathrow Airport (then called London Airport).
Construction of London Airport’s new terminal in the 1950s
In the early 1950s, staff at London Heathrow Airport were assisted in finding accommodation because of the acute housing shortage in Britain at the time. With assistance to what became British Airways Staff Housing Association, 3,500 homes were provided by 1952, many of them in Stanwell, Heston and Feltham.
In 1953 the first concrete slab of the first modern runway at London Heathrow Airport was ceremonially placed the Queen, and i n 1955 she opened the new Europa building (today’s Terminal 2) and a tunnel at Heathrow's central area. Unfortunately this tunnel cannot quite deal with today’s massive passenger traffic.
The second major tragedy at London Heathrow Airport happened on 1st October 1956, when the RAF’s first Avro Vulcan bomber, arriving from Australia, crashed on approach to the runway. The pilot and one passenger survived but the four other occupants, including the co-pilot, died instantly.
Longford villager Henry Wild witnessed the crash. He said: “I was standing in the farmyard when a very severe thunderstorm was approaching with a lot of lightning and strong wind. There was a tremendous noise and there appeared a triangular aircraft from the low clouds. It was so low it was obvious it could not reach the runway.
“There were two cracks then a loud bang as it crashed then silence. The cracks were the ejector seats. It fell in a field of brussel sprouts about half a mile southwest of the village.
“I heard afterwards that it was told not to land but an Air Vice Marshal aboard overruled the advice as he wanted to be sure to meet the air ministry welcoming party: he had also ordered the co-pilot to give him his seat so he was able to eject when the crash came. He broke his ankle.”
The Public Records Office has a photo of the runway at Heathrow Airport in 1955. To see the photo, click here.
The 1960s
In 1961, the new Oceanic terminal (today’s Terminal 3) opened to handle long-haul carriers. Terminal 1 opened in 1968, completing the cluster of buildings at the centre of London Heathrow Airport.
A leaflet from the 1960s about London Airport
The 1970s…
In 1973, Lord Harold Balfour (Under-Secretary of State for Air 1938-1944) revealed in his autobiography Wings Over Westminster that he deliberately conned the government into claiming the land at Heathrow to use as an RAF base.
Balfour wrote that he always intended the site to be used for civil aviation and used an emergency requisition order to avoid a public inquiry. Balfour argued for the need to claim land at Heathrow for a bomber airfield although there were several existing airfields in the Home Counties which would have been suitable.
Balfour’s persuasion was successful and the Government took the land using emergency powers in The Defence Of The Realm Act 1939, which prevented an appeal. The Royal Air Force never made use of the airport and it was given to the Ministry of Civil Aviation on 1 st January 1946.
Balfour wrote: “Almost the last thing I did at the Air Ministry of any importance was to hi-jack for Civil Aviation the land on which London [Heathrow] Airport stands…If high-jack is too strong a term I plead guilty to the lesser crime of deceiving a Cabinet Committee.
“Those of us who had studied post-war Civil Aviation needs knew that spreading out from the Fairey Aviation Company’s small grass aerodrome on the Great West Staines Road was land ideal for London’s main airport.
“Our only hope lay in taking over the Fairey field and adjacent land under wartime powers and regulations. These powers were drastic...”
On 18 th June 1972, a crash at London Heathrow Airport claimed the lives of all 118 people aboard the airplane, making it the worst disaster in British aviation history. A British European Airways plane taking off from London Heathrow Airport bound for Brussels crashed minutes after takeoff. The plane came down in a field in Staines, missing the town centre by just a few hundred yards. Bizarrely, the Trident jet had been involved in another accident in 1968.
The jet left London Heathrow Airport at 5:10 pm. It was only three miles from the airport when witnesses said it "dropped out of the sky", breaking in two as it fell. Astoundingly, two people (a young girl and an Irish businessman) were alive when pulled from the wreckage but died later in hospital.
The Air Accidents Investigation Branch found that a speed error made the plane stall, and it was not high enough for the crew to regain control. An autopsy on pilot Stanley Key found he had a heart condition which may have caused him pain immediately prior to the crash, impairing his judgement and leading him to make the fatal mistake.
The BBC website for this incident is here and includes a link to three and a half minutes of video of the crash scene shortly after the crash. A report from The Guardian is here.
A debate about the origin of Heathrow Airport’s name began on 21 st December 1973 in the Evening Standard when an article declared that Heathrow was named after Judge Heath.
"Some air passengers arriving in this country think that Heathrow is named after the Prime Minister (then Edward Heath), as Kennedy Airport is named after President Kennedy.
“In fact it was named after a man whose estate was on the site. John Heath, cousin of Dr. Benjamin Heath, the Harrow Headmaster who abolished archery at Harrow and brought in cricket and public speaking in its place, was a Judge of Common Pleas.
“Judge Heath was a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas from 1780 to 1818 and had a house in Hayes about three miles from Heath Row and about 600 yards west of the Parish Church of Saint Mary at Hayes. The house was demolished many years ago. It stood on the north side of a lane which is now known as Judge Heath Lane and so commemorates his connection with Hayes. He died on his land at what is now the airport."
Then on 31 st December 1973, another letter appeared claiming Heathrow was named after the destroyed hamlet Heath Row:
"The statement in Londoner's Diary claiming that Heathrow Airport is named after Judge John Heath is incorrect. Heathrow Airport derives its name from a hamlet called Heath Row, which was obliterated during the construction of the airport.
“The hamlet of Heath Row was on the western part of Hounslow Heath and lay along a road that ran in a southerly direction from near the Magpies Inn on the bath Road at Sipson in the Parish of Harmondsworth.
“The name "Heath Row" can be found on maps and documents going back several hundred years, long before Judge Heath was born. Some strange variations in spelling occur, as in the case of Hithero in John Warburton's map of Middlesex dated 1749. It appears as Heath Row in John Rocque's map of Middlesex of 1754.”
Additionally, on a 1675 map of Middlesex, the hamlet of Heath Row is shown as "Hetherow". In "The Place Names of Middlesex" the name is given as "Hetherow" in the time of King Henry V, "Hetherowfeyld" in the time of King Henry VII, and Hitherowe in 1547 and 1553. The book also states that it was probably the home of John atte Hetthe, i.e. John who lived at, or on, the heath.
The 1980s…
In November 1983 an armed gang carried out Britain’s largest-ever robbery at London Heathrow Airport. The robbers stole £26 million in gold bars from a vault at London Heathrow Airport.
The gold, which had been destined for the Far East, was stolen sometime between 6:30 and 8:15 am from the Brinks Mat warehouse, just outside London Heathrow Airport.
The Brinks Mat warehouse just after the robbery (link to the news story)
Only a small fraction of the gold was ever recovered. Police estimated 15 people were involved in the robbery, but only three men were ever convicted.
Terminal 4 opened in 1986 on the south side of the airport to help ease the pressure on the central area. It became the home for the newly privatised British Airways. Terminal 4 is a modern facility but an inconvenient ten- to 20-minutes from the heart of London Heathrow Airport.
In 1987, the Government also privatized the British Airports Authority (now called BAA), and gave it control of seven UK airports including Heathrow.
On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded 38 minutes after takeoff, killing all on board and several on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland. A terrorist bomb was on the flight, which had been on route from Frankfurt to London Heathrow to New York. To read the BBC article looking back at this event in Heathrow's history, click here.
The 2000s…
In 2001 London Heathrow Airport handled around 64 million passengers, making it the busiest airport in the world. Ninety airlines flew to 160 destinations worldwide, and on average 1,250 flights were taking off from London Heathrow Airport every day. In July 2001, airport staff recorded Heathrow’s busiest day ever when 213,000 passengers passed through its terminals.
London Heathrow Airport zooms into the future
On 20 th November 2001, Transport Minister Stephen Byers announced the Government would allow a fifth terminal at Heathrow. Terminal 5 will be towards the western side, but within the current boundary of London Heathrow Airport. When it is fully operational in 2015, Heathrow will be able to handle up to 90 million passengers a year. Its current limit is 65 million. The granting of planning permission followed a long battle between airlines and environmental groups, who caused the longest public inquiry in British history, lasting nearly four years.
Friends of the Earth were among the groups protesting about Terminal 5.
On 17 th February 2003, a terror alert in the UK and US increased security at London Heathrow Airport. The prime minister, Tony Blair, authorised the use of troops because of fears that al-Qaida attack at the end of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.
Troops patrolling London Heathrow Airport in 2003
Over 450 troops joined 1,000 extra police officers in patrolling the airport. The armoured tanks within Heathrow alarmed many passengers. Critics called this a major public relations disaster for the UK tourism industry.
Starting in April 2003, Heathrow passengers got higher landing charges than passengers at other airports such as Gatwick an Stansted. The Civil Aviation Authority allowed this increase to reflect the fact that Heathrow, as an international hub, is more popular with passengers and airlines. When Terminal 5 opens in 2008, landing charges are expected to be £8.23 per passenger, up from £6.13 in April 2003.
In a three-year project starting in July 2003, archeologists uncovered more than 80,000 objects such as pottery and flint from the building site of Terminal 5, some from the Bronze Age.
Two Iron Age pottery cups found at the Terminal 5 site at London Heathrow Airport
Eighty archaeologists worked on the site for 15 months to find out how the communities and landscape around Heathrow have changed, in what became the largest single archaeological dig ever undertaken in the UK. They discovered that the Terminal 5 site was a sacred centre for the Druids five thousand years ago. Druid priests used the site to communicate with the spirit world, and hold sacred fertility and funeral rituals. Objects from the dig are displayed at the Museum of London.
Click here for more photographs from the dig
Pilots waving flags at London Heathrow Airport to celebrate the Concorde’s last flight
The supersonic Concorde made its last flight from Heathrow to its birthplace at Filton airfield near Bristol on 26th November 2003. British Airways Concorde 216 was the last of its kind to fly into retirement.
During the Christmas season in 2003, movie audiences recognised London Heathrow Airport as a backdrop in the Richard Curtis romantic comedy Love Actually. A secret camera installed at the arrivals hall at Terminal 4 captured the happiest reunions and these were played at the beginning and end of the film.
The major airlines at Heathrow, especially British Airways, want a third full length runway. On 14 th December 2003 Transport Secretary Alistair Darling released a white paper revealing that a third runway will indeed be built at London Heathrow Airport by 2020, as long as the airlines meet targets on environmental issues such as aircraft noise, traffic congestion and pollution. However, construction of this runway would involve the demolition of local residential areas. Many groups including residents, environmentalists, and historians passionately oppose this new runway. A poignant summary of their arguments can be seen in this Daily Telegraph article by Lucinda Lambton dated 15 th March 2003:
“Many [of Heathrow’s buildings] have stood since the Norman Conquest; stood, that is, for almost a thousand years, only to be threatened today with annihilation by airport runways.
”Year in and year out, at Heathrow I have marvelled at the clinging-on-for-dear-life enclaves of old England at its best: of being able to drive from one Norman church to another, down as-narrow-as-your-car country lanes and over tiny humpback bridges spanning such watercourses as the Duke of Northumberland river, while all the ime within yards of Britain's largest airport. The sense of the surreal never fails.
”Harmondsworth, where the dread of development hangs heaviest of all, will lose buildings of the first order. With its Norman church and 18th-century pub, not to mention its 18th- and 19th-century houses, this is rich architectural fare.
St Mary’s Church in Harmondsworth
The stone and flint body of the church of St Mary's dates from the 1100s, while the 18th-century battlemented tower is built of Tudor bricks, topped by a cupola that shelters the bells - an endearingly rustic version of Wren's baroque bell-towers in London.
“Then there is the "Mass clock", a pre-Reformation rarity, dating from the 1200s or earlier, with flints forming a sundial that showed the time of day, along with the times of the masses incised deeper into the stone. Most fanciful of all is the Norman doorway, with birds carved so that their pointed beaks form the decorative design of the day. Executed in the 1200s, treasured for 800 years, it may be destroyed in 2003 for a monster mass of tarmac.
”Heathrow was, after all, the richest agricultural land in the United Kingdom. Its legacy still looms magnificently large today in the form of the 15th-century tithe barn at Harmondsworth - at 192ft, the second longest in Britain. Justly known as "The Cathedral in Wood", its great webs of pale, untreated oak - chosen, most suitably, by John Atte Oke in 1424 - giving all the appearance of Gothickery, it is a jaw-dropping sight. Its marvellous medieval carpentry survives unaltered since the day it was created in 1427. This, too, would be flattened by Heathrow's newest runway.
”If only I could enlist the ghosts of Harmondsworth and Harlington as fellow protestors: what weighty voices we could muster! Due to vanish beneath international airport ersatz is the grave of one whose triumph we still taste today. Richard Cox, who first propagated the Cox's Orange Pippin in 1825, lies buried at Harmondsworth. He died never having known of the success of his apple, which once grew by the thousand on Heathrow land.
“Robert de Salis, who rode in the Charge of the Light Brigade, lived and died at Harlington, where yet another Norman church will be grazed by jets. Would that he could thunder to the aid of his hamlet. Lord Knyvett, who foiled the Gunpowder Plot, also lies nearby, and no doubt would be incandescent with rage at these proposals. A useful ally for writers of letters of protest would be Eustace Burnaby, who patented white writing paper!
“What, too, about Sir Edward Suckling, who invented cribbage in the 1600s and who loved the place? Or the 17th-century clergyman Dr John Wilkins, who, with grim presage for the future of Heathrow, was one of the first to write about life on the "moone" and of the means of flying to it; experimenting in a "land sailing carriage" about Hounslow Heath.
“Would that I could summon up all their inventiveness, artistry, poetry and prose to save the surviving buildings around Heathrow from destruction.”
…and the future
With passenger traffic at the world’s busiest airport showing every sign of increasing, the pressures on London Heathrow Airport keep mounting. The city rail link to the airport’s central area is now open and Terminal 5 will open in 2008.
Plans for Terminal 5, by the Laing O’Rourke Group
The transport network around London Heathrow is being extended to cope with increased number of passengers, and a spur motorway will run from the M25 between junctions 14 and 15 to Terminal 5. The Heathrow Express will be extended with a station at the new terminal. The Piccadilly Line on the London Underground will also be expanded.
A sixth terminal is likely to follow. When this is built, London Heathrow Airport’s capacity will be increased to 115 million passengers per year.
For more about London Heathrow Airport, read Heathrow - 2000 Years of History by Philip Sherwood, published by Sutton Publishing in 1999, ISBN 0750921323. You can order it from your library or purchase it from your bookstore quoting the ISBN number.
Further links for London Heathrow Airport
- BAA plc (link to http://www.baa.co.uk) – this is the company that owns Heathrow
- Department for Transport and Aviation (link to http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_aviation/documents/sectionhomepage/dft_aviation_page.hcsp)
- London Heathrow Airport ’s official webpage (link to http://www.baa.co.uk/main/airports/heathrow/)
- Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise (link to http://www.hacan.org.uk/)
- BBC News report on the go-ahead for the third runway (link to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3324701.stm)
- Longford Resident’s Association (link to http://www.thisislongford.com/) including their interesting “What if it happened at Heathrow?” page (link to http://www.thisislongford.com/heathrow.htm#What%20if%20it%20happened%20at%20Heathrow)
Before you go to London Heathrow Airport be sure to book your airport parking (http://www.skyparksecure.com).
