Transport

HA21 visit Heathrow Runway 3

In January the government announced its intention to extend Heathrow Airport on its northern side, with an extension of the same size and capacity as Gatwick Airport has now. On Saturday November 7 five members of HA21 took the 140 bus to Harlington, to walk through the proposed northern extension to Heathrow Airport, Runway 3, and to learn more about it.

Harlington is outside the proposed boundary* of the airport extension, but will inevitably be seriously affected by it. At the start of our walk we passed the William Byrd School which is right in line with the runway and under the flight-path. The school is intended to remain open – the Building Research Establishment conducted studies 30 years ago which showed that aircraft noise seriously hampers education, and the perils of this situation are obvious.

* I am torn between keeping the text simple, and keeping the text honest. I have chosen to keep the text simple, by omitting “proposed”. For the rest of this article, any reference to the airfield site and its boundary is to the proposed airfield site and its boundary.

As we went along Sipson Lane we were level with aircraft landing from the east, having flown over Cranford and Hounslow. Crossing the boundary to enter the site of the Heathrow extension we noticed some industrial activity – gravel was being extracted, Sita were using one pit left from previous extraction for land-fill, and were landscaping another. Gravel is an extractive industry – after extraction what we have left is a hole in the ground. A warning about how we conduct our life on the earth – we cannot continue to use all its resources unsustainably – the resources of materials and fuel we have are not just ours – we may have the use of them, but they are for all of humanity, both today and future generations. We need to be more restrained about what we use, and more imaginative about how we use it again, or else we will be faced with many more holes in the ground.

All of Sipson falls in the airfield extension and faces compulsory purchase and demolition, including the Heathrow Primary School (with its outstanding Ofsted report and its Walk (to school) once a Week campaign) and the William IV public house.

At Sipson we passed Greenpeace’s site, a field with many owners (including our Chair) to make compulsory purchase difficult. In September Climate Rush visited a series of sites which were under threat or were good examples of sound environmental practice. Their journey started at Greenpeace’s site and ended at Totnes, a transition town.

We crossed the motorway link between the M4 and the airport. Unwittingly we were also crossing the Heathrow rail link which is in a tunnel. Surprisingly there are no plans for rail access to Terminal 6 and Runway 3, which will be served by road transport alone. Road traffic to Heathrow and surface transport servicing it already have serious effects on air quality – why is this possibility to use a less damaging alternative being missed?

After Sipson we left the airfield site, and had lunch in Harmondsworth. We stopped in the churchyard to view Harmondsworth tithe barn, the largest surviving tithe barn, potentially as attractive as those in the National Trust’s hands or the Harrow Museum, but at risk now, and more so in the future. The churchyard contains the grave of Richard Cox, of Cox’s Orange Pippin fame, but we didn’t find this. The village of Harmondsworth, its church, barn and businesses will be surrounded on 3 sides by the airport – it will remain physically but will become uninhabitable and isolated.

We saw aircraft taking off to the west towards Windsor, and glimpses of Terminal 5, but failed to spot Grundon’s incinerator at Colnbrook. This is currently for clinical waste, but there are proposals for it to take a wider range of waste in an “energy-from-waste” project.

We passed alongside the River Colne, the traditional boundary between Middlesex and Buckinghamshire, and went under the M4 near its junction with the M25 – a large structure which shows the demand construction makes for minerals (not just the gravel we had seen being extracted earlier). We continued east through West Drayton, along roads with the peaceful names of Magnolia Street, the Brambles and Keats Way – all already within earshot of the M4, noise which will increase with the new runway.

We passed along Cherry Lane, past Cherry Lane Cemetery, which is threatened by a new perimeter road to serve the airport extension. When St. Pancras station was built this also disturbed a graveyard, but 150 years on St. Pancras is still functioning as a railway terminus, still fulfilling its original role under modern conditions. Can we expect an airport extension, which relies on petroleum fuels and disregards the fact that we are at “peak oil”, will still be functioning 150 years from now?

Travel is part of our lives, we need to travel and trade, and in making the proposal to extend Heathrow the airport authorities and airlines are responding to the need they perceive. They have developed an economic case which they consider justifies expansion.

Does the economic case for expansion take into account all the environmental costs that our walk has identified? These are substantial – calculations are easy to do once you have made assumptions, but it is difficult to make these honestly and transparently. What is the cost and value of disturbed nights, interrupted lessons, daytime noise, heritage, wildlife, congestion and air pollution on the ground, and isolation and demolition of communities?

Some would doubt whether it is possible to make any honest calculation, and we have not begun to address the wider implications of expanded air travel on the climate change commitments the government has accepted.

Some of our travel is in response to our wish to travel, not our need to do so. Can we choose to travel by a less damaging method, or less often?

Is all air freight necessary? Temperate foodstuffs grown in the third world and air-freighted here undermine the ability of the country producing them to feed its own people, and our own horticulture which could produce them.

Do we need to airfreight products with a longer shelf-life, which could go by sea? or could be produced here, as they once were?

If we make a clearer distinction between our need to travel and our wish to travel, and are more discriminating about our trade, the “need” that airport authorities and airlines perceive could disappear, and the economic case for expansion would disappear with it. As citizens we have this choice.