It would require the deployment of trebuchets and battering rams for Heathrow airport to feel more besieged than it has this previous week. The economic secretary to the Treasury, Kitty Ussher, identified "the Heathrow hassle" as a factor damaging the City's status as a financial centre. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said the wretched terminus "shames London". John Tincey, of the Immigration Service Union, observed that passport control queues were longer than many short haul international flights. A survey of Heathrow's recent coverage would leave a neutral observer imagining that, were some or other yahoos to attempt a Glasgow airport-style assault upon the place, they would barely be able to see to steer their car bomb through the rose petals flung by grateful citizens.
The opprobrium piled upon Heathrow, while largely merited, misses a crucial point. The key to understanding the ghastliness of Heathrow airport is not the "Heathrow" but the "airport". I spend a lot of time in airports, and can confidently declare Heathrow no worse than most. Airports are full of people who, by definition, wish they were somewhere else. Perhaps for this reason, no consideration appears to be given to making airports pleasant environments in which to be. The queues and the pettifogging security checks probably can't be helped. The overwhelming, dispiriting characterlessness of the places can.
In 2007 alone, I've used the airports of London, Sydney, Melbourne, New York, Bucharest, Graz, Caracas, Nice, Bangkok and Singapore. Any one of them could have been any of the others: the same Speer-meets-Starck architecture, the same Dan Brown books on the racks, the same posters of David Beckham in stupid sunglasses, the same bloody awful food, the same piped pop pabulum. The only one that distinguished itself in my recent travels was Mehrabad airport in Tehran, which, while a decrepit dump, at least flaunted some local character - the Islamically correct gender-divided entrances to security screening; the huge gilt-framed tapestries unfathomably offered in duty free. The fault is a cultural one with the airline industry in general, not merely Heathrow in particular.
Possibly in a bid to relax us about hurtling through the sky at 1,000 kilometres an hour, airports aim to make the experience seem boring and ordinary. That they have been rather too successful at this can be confirmed by surveying the morose, defeated herd known as the travelling public.
Airports - especially Heathrow, which handles more international passengers than any other - should reconnect themselves and ourselves with the staggering accomplishment of modern air travel, which has done more to promote a global consciousness than anything else we've ever done. For those awaiting departure, there could be aviation museums instead of shops, galleries instead of theme pubs, pilots lecturing on the marvels of their trade.
For those arriving, an airport should at least say something about the city it serves - other, that is, than the current default, of Heathrow and all other ports of arrival on our querulous planet, of: "Who the hell are you, and what do you want?"
