City Airport’s expansion represents a failure of London’s media and politicians

On 27 July, the UK government gave London City Airport the go-ahead to expand. There are 77,000 takeoffs and landings there each year — this figure is set to increase to 111,000. For hundreds of thousands of Londoners, this means more noise and more pollution as the little airport in the Royal Docks continues its steady expansion.

Its backers say it will bring jobs and prosperity. It may do, it may not. But by contrast with the huge rows over Heathrow’s proposed third runway, the public has been denied a full and open debate on London City’s expansion thanks to a lack of interest from media and politicians.

If you live in south-east or east London, your life is already affected by London City Airport. But you probably don’t know it.

Boom time in Catford

A few days ago, I was disturbed by a booming sound from a jet roaring overhead. For a split second, I feared it was in trouble. A few minutes later, it repeated itself. I was curious to see what was going on, so I grabbed my phone and found my location — I was in Catford at the time — on the Flightradar24 website, which tracks civil aircraft movements across the world.

It turned out they were jets heading to London City. I may have been six miles from the airport, but the noise made it sound much nearer.

Flightradar24 gets addictive, especially when you get the app — it’s fascinating to see how far aircraft noise carries, as well as seeing where they’re going or have come from. I can see why my late friend Tom, who lived under the Heathrow flightpath at Brentford, used to tweet about the comings and goings above.

I repeated the trick at home. I live only a couple of kilometres away from London City Airport as the crow flies, although as it’s across the River Thames it can feel as if it’s in another country.

Apart from the odd burst downwind, I’d assumed most of the aircraft noise I could hear at my place in Charlton was from Heathrow-bound jets. That accounts for some of it — usually from a flightpath which sees jets turn over Greenwich Peninsula and the Isle of Dogs.

But it turns out I can hear every take-off and landing at London City from my home. It’s not deafening, and I’ve clearly got used to it as background noise. (I grew up next to a flyover and tend to be deaf to this kind of thing.) But it’s certainly there.

If I’m hearing everything, then so are hundreds of thousands of other people. And they may not be as deaf to it as I am. And we’re all living with the extra pollution from these jets.

But where’s the debate about this?

London City Airport noise: a silenced debate

Maybe it goes back to the airport’s mid-1980s origins as a STOLport — meaning an airport for short takeoffs and landings, a name that’s been largely forgotten except in the name of a nearby minicab office. It opened in 1987 to service turboprop flights, but the big change came a couple of years later, with the arrival of jets. I remember going over there to see a demonstration with a BAe 146. I was very young at the time, but I remember it flying in incredibly quietly. Sceptical locals were won round, and the airport’s expansion began.

Since then, the noise has got louder — affecting not just the Royal Docks, but a great swathe of east and south-east London. But the debate over it was largely snuffed out with that 1980s open day — and it’s been difficult to question it since then.

There has been debate and coverage in local media north of the river Thames. Local campaigner Alan Haughton has worked himself to exhaustion trying to draw attention to the proposals. And to its credit, Waltham Forest Council took up the cudgels on behalf of its residents a few miles north of the airport.

But City Airport’s expansion has gone largely unnoticed south of the river, even though the runway is just yards from the Thames. It’s barely been mentioned in local media, while local politicians have sat on their hands, quietly willing big infrastructure projects on but leaving others to face the flak for the consequences.

I feel guilty myself — I run a couple of local websites but never got around to mentioning the issue as it was something I never felt I understood properly (probably because of the lack of other coverage to take a cue from). I always planned to ask Alan Haughton to write something for me, but never got around to it. Sorry, Alan.

There’s also been a paucity of coverage in the London-wide media. London City’s continued expansion doesn’t have the dramatic, village-levelling impact of a new Heathrow runway. But it still has a huge impact on Londoners’ lives.

Does London even need the airport? Be honest now…

There’s a habit of treating big infrastructure developments as stories with only a limited local impact — but the consequences of this will be felt for miles around, just as with new roads, rail lines or shopping centres. The almost continual coverage of the admittedly-barmy Garden Bridge proposal — the practical impact of which is limited to a very small area — has dwarfed that of the City Airport scheme.

Green Party mayoral candidate Sian Berry attempted to change the debate earlier this year by proposing closing City Airport, echoing a paper issued by the New Economics Foundation in 2014 which said that huge runway space could be used for housing and employment instead. She gained some coverage, but not enough to draw other candidates into the discussion.

Whatever the merits or drawbacks of Berry’s proposal — it could have inadvertently encouraged Heathrow expansion by encouraging City’s patrons to head there by Crossrail — it deserved better coverage than it got.

Maybe too many in politics and the media use City to even contemplate this mild proposal as realistic. I’ve used it once myself and it’s certainly impressive — taking off for Dublin and turning north over the Dome and the Olympic Park provides stunning views (a low roar in the distance tells me a jet’s doing just this as I type); coming home and being on the Docklands Light Railway within 15 minutes of disembarking feels almost luxurious. Viewed from the University of East London campus across the Royal Albert Dock, the sight of the planes coming in and out is impressive.

But does this justify the disruption to people’s lives? What’s in it for the shift worker who can’t sleep?

Never mind expansion — in an era of high-speed rail and Crossrail to Heathrow, do we even need London City Airport any more? Or is it simply a vital component of London’s financial machine we can’t do without? It’s a debate our capital needs to have — for the sake of both residents and travellers (and those who fit both categories).

But it’s too late now. We’ll just have to live with the jets and the noise and everything else. Let’s just hope the scheme’s backers are right about the jobs and investment — because ordinary Londoners will be the losers if they don’t come.