Heathrow is built on Grade 1 farmland, the best and most productive, much of it now buried under concrete and tarmac. Friends of the Earth points out that just the area under tarmac is equal to 200 miles of three-lane motorway. The huge new Terminal 5 is scheduled to open this month, March 2008, and now government wants to build a third runway, which would mean the demolition of the village of Sipson, currently outside the airport. Sipson, like Heathrow itself, is in the Green Belt, a designation that is supposed to prevent the loss of countryside. Terminal 5 is the largest building ever constructed within the Green Belt, which to the west and south-west of London is a lost cause, a cause to which national government shows scant allegiance.

Heathrow Airport west of London covers 3,000 acres, according to data on www.airport-technology.com. It’s not just the land take that is worrying, but the quality of that land. I dusted down a report called The Horticultural Industry of Middlesex, written by Dr L G Bennett in 1952, and on page 15 read:

“When the airport was projected in 1943 a total of 1,300 acres of horticultural land was appropriated and 20 growers displaced either wholly or partly from their holdings. The 1,300 acres of land concerned included 70 acres of orchards and 2.75 acres of glassgouses. The original loss of land to the horticultural industry represented some 15% of its former acreage [in the county of Middlesex]. ”

Dr Bennett calculated that between 1900 and 1950 two-thirds of the horticultural land in Middlesex was lost to development, including the airport.

By 2030 or so Heathrow is likely to be a relic of the age of profligate energy use. The land under the concrete and tarmac will be of more value to use for food production than the runways built for an era of mass transportation. A much smaller airport will suffice then. Now, in 2008, we should be planning how to reclaim land at Heathrow for farming in the future, when food imports will be scarcer. We produce only about 10% of our fresh fruit and 60% of our fresh vegetables, and so are at high risk of future shortages.

Governments are not good at long-term planning. Their time horizons tend to the five years, the maximum period between General Elections. Planning for a future with dramatically less energy and less food requires more than five years, and should be in full swing now. Yet telling people that the years of easy prosperity are nearly at an end is not a vote-winner, while protecting the 70,000 jobs at the airport, and the over 100,000 jobs dependent on the airport, has immediate political importance. Heathrow “is the biggest single-site employer in the UK”, says the British Airports Authority (www.heathrowairport.com).

Jobs now or food later?

We should at least be debating the issue seriously.