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With talk of ‘Boris Island’, the proposed airport in the Thames Estuary, being on and then off again in the space of a just a few days, we look at the location of what is currently London?s largest transport hub, and the history that led to ?Heath Row? becoming one of the world?s biggest and busiest airports…
 Vrrrroooooosssshhhh! If you hop in to your DeLorean, accelerate to 88mph and set the dial back to the early 1940s, you?d find that Heathrow, or Heath Row as it was known back then, was a small hamlet located roughly where Terminal 3 is in the modern day facility.
During wartime Britain, The Conservative MP Harold Balfour, who was Minister for Aviation, wanted to persuade parliament that a new airport was needed in London, which would replace Croydon as the capital?s number one landing strip. As Heath Row already had an existing, albeit small airfield in place, and was within spitting distance of London, the site was earmarked as Balfour?s first choice.
The major hurdle to overcome was the prevailing winds. Planes coming in to land would usually have to approach from the east, taking them directly over central London. This obviously presented both safety risks with planes flying over densely populated areas, as well as what we now call ‘noise pollution’ for the unfortunate souls living under the flight path. Luckily for Balfour, noise pollution had not been invented yet so this was one less issue for him to tackle. Other obstacles in the way were the potential for protracted planning wrangles and questions over how it would be paid for (does this sound familiar Boris?).
The only way that Balfour could get Parliament to agree to the plan was by convincing them that the airport was needed for military purposes. With the country still in the midst of war, the Air Ministry claimed it was looking for an airfield in which to handle long-range troop-carrying planes, and so it used war-time powers to requisition the land. The location of Heath Row, with its proximity to London, was ideal and so under the guise of creating a military airfield, work on creating ‘Heathrow’ began in May 1944. The terrain was not ideal, however, and over 100 million gallons of water had to be drained from the boggy land. Despite the fact that works were still not complete by the time the war ended, construction continued on what was obviously now a civilian airport and it seemed that the project had slipped under the radar of both politicians and the public (pun intended).
Commercial flight was still something of a novelty at this time. However, in May 1946, the first passengers departed from Heathrow (or London Airport as it was first known), flying direct to Buenos Aires. The facilities were far from grand — the departure hall consisted of little more than a tent. This flight marked the start of a flight schedule that would eventually see over 480,000 flights a year take off or land from the west London airport.
In his memoirs published in 1973, Harold Balfour admitted deceiving fellow Ministers and Parliamentarians about his intentions for Heathrow, saying:
?Almost the last thing I did at the Air Ministry of any importance was to hijack for Civil Aviation the land on which London [Heathrow] Airport stands under the noses of resistant Ministerial colleagues. If hijack is too strong a term, I plead guilty to the lesser crime of deceiving a Cabinet Committee.?
So next time you’re woken up at 5am by an Airbus A380 flying over your house, you’ll know who to thank…
Image by Tony Lasagne from the Londonist Flickr pool
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 London Underground are failing to keep their promise of maintaining staff on stations when ticket offices are closed, London Travelwatch has found.
Last February LU reduced opening hours at a number of ticket offices where demand was slow. TfL told us in December 2009, when the plan was first mooted:
We are also committed to staff on all of our stations throughout the day to provide the best possible service for our customers
and TfL Commissioner Peter Hendy told Dave Hill in October 2010:
We don’t intend ever to run stations with nobody on them. I want people on the gatelines and on the platform.
So when London Travelwatch started getting complaints from tube users of unstaffed stations they arranged a series of ‘mystery shopper’ visits. Just under half the stations had no visible staff on the gateline; sometimes unstaffed gates were left open ? allowing the possibility of fare dodging ? but on 21 occasions researchers found the gates closed and nobody around to offer help in case of a problem.
Nigel Holness, London Underground’s network services director, told the BBC that London Underground
does not recognise the picture… Our independent research shows LU staff are present in ticket halls in 98% of visits
London Travelwatch’s report also found that, weirdly, some ticket offices are open when they’re supposed to be closed, and criticised inconsistent information signage and train information displays. On the other hand, they always found a working ticket machine and stations were clean and graffiti-free.
Another small detail that we found interesting: waiting times at ticket machines were sometimes noted to be longer than guidelines given to suburban rail operators. An anecdote on page 23 about people queueing at London Bridge on a Saturday afternoon (waiting times longer than standards, even after people gave up and left the queue) will be familiar to anyone who travels that way.
Photo by Homemade from the Londonist Flickr pool
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A London graphic designer has created a new take on cycling route signage that could change the way we find our way get lost in the capital.
If you’ve ever tried to follow any of the London Cycle Network’s routes you’ll be familiar with the mental anguish of searching the road side for the 4cm x 8cm red number that may or may not give you a new direction at each junction, side road and on occasion random patch of shared-use pavement. The modern alternative, great cycling apps like Bikehub, have a lot going for them — but with their computer-like efficiency they produce routes so complex that the human mind (ours at any rate) can’t possibly remember each of the 31 maneuvers on a typical journey. So we find ourselves, for the most part, heading for the main roads that we know, using the A road signage for broad directions and filling in the gaps with a bit of instinct — SE1 to Crystal Palace? Well that’s Elephant, Walworth Road, head for Camberwell, and, err, south and up-hill a bit.
Jun Kwon, a Graphic Design Student at Ravebsborne College, decided to tackle this problem for his submission to the International Society of Typographic Designers 2011 awards. His creation, Cycling Cities, is an attempt at a clean-slate approach for cycling signage — and we love it. Catering to our simple minds, Jun proposes to use a combination of landmarks, tube stations and compass direction to keep people on track.
Jun, who’s from Korea, said “I am… still not very good at wayfinding in London. Even worse thing was, rather many times, I fall myself into some very dangerous moments as I was cycling, so as a graphic designer I really wanted to solve this problem in a new way that can be interpreted by international people.”
His research found that people build a mental map as they cycle, and his solution builds on this natural ‘waypoint’ technique of navigation. He combined this with the 12 direction codes from the compass to create a flexible standard.
Jun, who proposed the idea to TfL last year, told us that he “doesn’t think this is a complete and perfect solution, but I would love to develop it to make it more useful and supportive of cyclists in cities”.
London’s Harry Beck led the world on making sense of railways — no doubt because we had a rather complicated one to start with. This couldn’t be more true of our roads. Innovative ideas like this could help our somewhat subterranean-minded population negotiate street-level by bike, just as Legible London is doing for walking.
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Welcome to the latest episode of Londonist Out Loud, a podcast about London. You can listen in-browser, or subscribe via iTunes or RSS.
 News and Views
Londonist Out Loud is presented and produced by N Quentin Woolf. This week?s show comes from The Star cafe in Soho.
His guests this week are:
The guests discuss recent London news and features including Crossrail developments, the noses of Soho, London’s worst Tube stations, police spending on the Speaking Clock, the ‘Boris Island’ Thames airport proposals, new libraries for London, trouble with the English Defence League, as well as far more London trivia than is probably good for you.
What?s On In London
NQW rounds up the best new exhibitions and shows opening over the coming week.
Remember, you can subscribe to Londonist Out Loud via iTunes or RSS.
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for more details.
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Two free art exhibitions to see at Camden Arts Centre in Hampstead
 Lycopodium, 2011 by Raphael Hefti / Courtesy Ancient and Modern Gallery, London Raphael Hefti: Launching Rockets Never Gets Old
Swiss artist Raphael Hefti specialises in interfering with the formation of materials and presenting the outputs. In his first solo UK exhibition, he focusses on the formation of glass.
Large panes of reflective glass have been altered to only reflect certain blue and yellow wavelengths of light, but the alteration was made while the glass was forming so it doesn?t have the artificial feel that you would associate with a colour filter.
As you walk around the room surrounded by these ?mirrors? what you see is a mildly surreal reflection of yourself and everybody else in the room. This exhibit highlights the link between colour and emotions, as a yellow reflection of you seems brighter and more hopeful while the blue reflection creates a more sombre tone ? this may not be the reason why the expression ?feeling blue? came about, but after seeing your reflection in Hefti?s work you?ll think it should be.
However, the highlight of the exhibition is on display outside the gallery — two photographs of the patterns created when Lycopodium spores are burnt over photosensitive paper (Lycopodium being a type of club moss). Burning spores should create random patterns but the seamless interaction of the intense colours provides the illusion that Hefti has precisely directed the spores to create the effect he was after.
Though the photographs were created by tiny spores, they seem like representations of an event on a much grander scale with one photograph resembling a tumultuous ocean filled with different coloured dyes and the other an exploding star.
 9 x 11 = 99 (detail), 1972 / Courtesy Camden Arts Centre and Konrad Fischer Galerie, © The estate of the artist Hanne Darboven
This is also the first UK solo exhibition for Hanne Darboven, a German conceptual minimalist artist. The walls of both galleries are covered with her writings, musical compositions and drawings. The content of these notes ranges from geometric shapes to indecipherable scribbling.
One of the larger installations is an entire wall of her notes and their lack of coherence makes it feel as if the gallery is displaying what was found on the wall of a serial killer?s home ? or at least Hollywood?s interpretation of a serial killer?s wall.
As the notes are often illegible or unintelligible they feel as if they are her private scribblings and not for public viewing. This, coupled with her writing desk in the middle of the gallery, provides a sense of both intimacy and intrusiveness, as if you?ve been allowed, or trespassed, into the artist?s mind. This is heightened by the knowledge that Darboven died in 2009.
At the same time, the private nature of the notes is also what makes this exhibition difficult to penetrate for the viewer. Though we?ve been brought into the inner sanctum of the artist, it feels as if a cipher is needed to decode her work fully and understand her innermost thoughts.
This lack of complete understanding might leave a bitter aftertaste for many viewers as they may feel as if they?ve been led halfway only to find an insurmountable wall preventing them from making the most of Darboven?s work.
By Tabish Khan
Raphael Hefti: Launching Rockets Never Gets Old and Hanne Darboven’s work are on show at Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Road, London, NW3 6DG from until 18 March. Entrance to both is free.
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