Boris Island

Great idea !

Of course it will be expensive. It will put London where it needs to be, ‘centre stage’. The value of the Heathrow site will help offset the massive cost.

I love the idea of putting it there, very convenient for me but I wonder what would happen to LCY?

However, I would put it further out to sea, make12 runways and connect it with high speed rail links to AMS and Brussels. All three airports could then be closed and turned over to housing!

I am afraid I consider such a proposal as utter rubbish.

With the two references mentioned by “Vintage Krug” my own opinions are well voiced.

A new airport in the Thames estuary is simply not on.

One of my comments made 17 months ago,was “The possibility of building an airport in the Thames Estuary was looked at nearly 40 years ago – Maplin Sands – and rejected at a public enquiry. I do not see how the adverse weather conditions and wildlife habitats will have changed substantially in that time.”

I standby my comments made then on those threads, as also can be seen on my blog.

Other (non-South East England) priorities are much greater and will be for some time in the present economic climate.

It would be criminal to spend such vast amounts of money on new infrastructure when the present facilities offer so much to be developed at less cost and more convenience.

Bury it.

I seem to remember something about Alconbury in Cambs a while back. If I am not mistaken it already has one of the longest runways in europe, its a big site (ex USAF) (2 runways) its effectivly in the middle of no-where with huntigdon the closest town some 7-8 miles from the airport.

Its right next to the A1M/A14/M11 so excellent road network N, E, S and W. The mainline is close by so adding a spur to hook strait down to the line and into Kings cross in 30 mins at HS would be no problem.

oh and its close to me 🙂

Yes infrastructure costs.
Short to medium term it makes more sense to extend ad hoc as LHR shows.
However it is possible long term that an integrated transport plan may show benefits in broadening the scope.
The current economic climate makes investment difficult to finance but such investment could provide the economic activity we need.
Either way wherever you put it the Nimbys will put pressure on their MP to kill it, as happens with every planning application in England.

The trick, I suspect, is to accept that from an economic perspective, what’s required is an airport for Britain – not just one for London.

For that to happen, we need an individual to champion the cause; one with a national perspective. Someone, possibly, like Boris Johnson were he to be PM, rather than mayor. It’s almost certainly not going to be Steve Hilton.

The issue is a huge one for the country to face, and it’s undoubtedly complicated by the fact that political terms are a tiny fraction of the timescales involved in infrastructure development. That tends to lead to an persistent unwillingness to invest in short term, deliverable but expensive projects (Crossrail), and/or superficial support for grandiose plans designed to distract attention from the critical need to make short term improvements (HS2).

It’s also complicated by the fact that any large project requires the continuation of investment in current infrastructure, especially when it is already operating at capacity, but which is extremely difficult to justify to investors.

It does rather seem that the Boris Island proposal is largely unworkable from a practical point of view though – putting environmental issues to one side, many approaches would have to be through Dutch airspace which is likely to be a non-starter. London City would also be forced to close, as the approaches would conflict.

Heathrow is an enormously valuable site, as VK notes, and redevelopment would present an incredible opportunity to expand the Berkshire technology campuses (campii?) into a capital-encroaching Silicon Dale.

I’m very much in support of the idea to finally construct the Heathrow-Gatwick-Ashford rail line which, even if Heathrow and/or Gatwick were ever decommissioned, would still represent a hugely valuable London-avoiding link from the North, Midlands, Wales, West and indeed the new developments on the former airport sites to the tunnel and continental Europe. Fundamentally, it appears something of a no-brainer to progress without delay.

Any completely new airport must be easily accessible for the country as a whole though, not just London – and this is another major problem with an estuarine location.

Luton is fundamentally compromised not by the lack of available space for runways and taxiways, and unforgiving terrain, but because it is already on the most congested part of the M1. That road corridor, at that location, is simply not able to absorb the additional traffic that Britain International would generate.

If there’s a blueprint around, it’s Munich, and if there’s a spatially-optimal location (that follows many of the Bavarian airport’s geolocational signposts) it’s not in the sea, it’s in Northamptonshire.

As VK also notes, this has all been dicussed at length in two previous threads.

It’s perhaps too easy to forget that what the Victorians did for us was to throw huge sums of private capital, which tended to be held in the hands of relatively few insanely wealthy individuals and families, at ambitious but scatter-gunned projects with almost no overall strategy whatsoever.

The idea of government-controlled mass infrastructure development is a much more early 20th Century mainland European thing, usually delivered by and for military constructs.

A modern-day approach that combines Victorian vision but with Cameronian sensitivity would be for Brookfield Multiplex to join forces with Deutsche Bahn, Westfield, British Airways and DHL to buy a whopping great tract of land and force Government into issuing the permissions it needs, developing a commercially-viable, strategically-linked facility and then asking every other airline to choose between it and Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, Birmingham and Bristol.

Shortly afterwards, there’d probably be a rather large listing on Ferrovial’s eBay page.

Absolutely right, binman62.

And I wouldn’t even need cosmetic teeth-fixing prior to me, my handkerchief and my handbag taking office, VK.

🙂