http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15546956#

Boris just won't keep his floppy hair inside the M25. Having been rebuffed with his plans for Boris Island out in the middle of the Thames Estuary, he now wants to build one slap bang in the middle of the only bit of decent wilderness left in North Kent.

BoJo! Sling yer 'ook! Hands off our marshes!

Here's an idea.

How London getting no more transport improvements for the next 30 years and instead we focus on the 88% of the UK population that don't live there.

Okay, I accept that London needs more runway capacity for teh coming decades. What's wrong with extra runways at Gatwick, Stanstead or Heathrow? Surely that would be much cheaper.

I disagree with that. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would rather travel long-haul flights from Bristol, Cardiff and Birmingham, rather than have to travel across the country to Heathrow and Gatwick, or further north to Manchester. Force the airlines to service the country.

What he said. Concentrating our long haul links in London just means everybody else has to schlep there to get a plane. It's ludicrous.

Jon

London does not need more people arriving into it.
Yet Plymouth airport's shut down (you can jump on a bus to Newquay instead and fly from there. Only adds about 1.5hrs to your journey time) and I suspect the rest of the smaller guys are feeling the squeeze a bit too.



Yeah that would be nice, wouldn't it?

I suspect the extra capacity is mostly needed for incoming traffic. Who's going to tell Jonny Foreigner that instead of flying directly to London - the place he wants to visit - he has to go via Manchester instead?

Yes, because everyone coming to Britain actually wants to come to London

Most do. London is easily the UK's number 1 tourist destination. I don't see many other cities struggling for airport capacity...

Can you cite a reference for that?


Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it isn't there. Apart from the obvious point that if you concentrate all the flights in London, that's the only place that will have capacity problems almost by definition. If there are other airports that have spare capacity, it makes more sense to move flights to them, rather than build a whole new airport at vast expense in London. And if the other airports don't have spare capacity, it will probably also cost less to expand them than it would to build another airport in London. Building another airport in London is actually the option that makes least sense in pretty much all cases.

Unless you assume London is the centre of the sodding universe.

Jon

No, I believe it comes under 'stating the bleeding obvious'. As for London being the "centre of the sodding universe", I have no love for the place, but there's no denying that it's the de facto cultural & economic capital of the UK by a country mile.There isn't another British city that even comes close. It is, of course, also the seat of government & capital city for the United Kingdom. London dominates the entire country in almost every conceivable way - legally, politically, culturally, financially etc etc ad infinitum.

For all these reasons & more it is quite obviously the number 1 tourist destination for both domestic & foreign visitors. To claim otherwise is rather like suggesting more British people visit Nice than Paris or Detroit than New York etc.

Clearly not all passengers are tourists in the sense that you make out. I've been to Denmark four times but I haven't been to Copenhagen once. I have customers in the shop travelling to Asia from London, and they've driven down from Aberdeen. Several years ago I flew from Heathrow to Newcastle for a business trip, but started in Southampton, which has it's own capable airport. There are many passengers who go to the big cities because that is where the flights are, not because they need or want to be there.

Landing cards should be ammended with a preferred arrival airport option.

The point is this proposed blot on the estuary is not meant purely as an arrivals airport.

Heathrow is a hub airport: people fly in from all over the planet, change planes and fly out. The plan is for a much larger airport to the east of London where planes fly in, disgorge their cargo into other planes, which then fly out again. The short-sighted concrete fiddlers seem to think this is important, but how it generates income for the country I don't get.

To my mind, we should let the larger European airports deal with that kind of stuff. We've got plenty of transport links to the continent, after all.

It would appear that Southend airport has applied for the London prefix to it's name.

Manston already uses it, I believe.

London Manston.

I accept you can almost see some of the taller bits of London in the mist up the Channel, but to claim any link with London when France is closer is just a joke.