Calm down, doughnutfans - I mean dis-ease, but I thought the cute use of punctuation in the title to undermine conventional meaning might be just too nauseatingly deconstructionist for the more delicate of you. I refer, of course, to the current Spencerian (Frank, not Herbert) management at Heathrow Terminal 5, and British Airways more generally. Whether it's losing the luggage of an entire small town, getting tangled up with caterers who sack their staff by megaphone, fixing prices or having their pilots go on strike, British Airways are rapidly becoming the Norman Wisdom of the skies. The world's favourite airline - if you like to point and laugh.
One of the effects of the embarrassment over Terminal 5 has been to entrench even more deeply a widespread scorn of Heathrow in general, one which I've always found rather unfair. In fact, I rather like airports. The first sentence of Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul suggests that "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport,'" which is witty enough, but also misses the point. Airports are never going to be architectural white knuckle rides, for two reasons (conveniently enough, arrivals and departures). Arrivals: no tourist economy is going to survive a situation whereby the airport is more fantastically exciting than the country outside (hence, no log flume at LAX or Quasar at Gatwick, notwithstanding the immediate appeal of thirty people lumbering around a smoky room with their hand luggage). Departures: let's not forget that the anodyne aesthetics of the airport are really a prelude to what remains the spectacular experience of actually taking off (hardened travellers with their nerves cauterised by enough air miles to take them to the moon might consider times when the plane has lurched unexpectedly when 'scaping the surly bonds of earth to punch god on the nose) and being a stupid height above the ground. In fact, it's at the airport ends when flight becomes most interesting, when the pedestrian view of the landscape suddenly unfolds into panoptic mode, when it turns from a postcard into a map.
The other accusations are that airports are boring and uniform. But, with the exception of seven hours in Chicago O'Hare (a reflection on the sheer mass of time waiting, not on O'Hare itself, although they generally need better bookshops), I can't remember ever being bored in an airport. This may be down to the fact that I've usually got something to read, but I prefer to think that it's the influence of a steady and ambient tension. How boring can a place be when there are people walking around with guns? And, furthermore, walking around with guns because there may be other people with guns, or something more devastating? In his recent (and rather controversial) collection The Second Plane, Martin Amis makes the observation that global terrorism really led to a rise in its opposite - global tedium, as we all spend longer waiting in the same lines to be asked the same questions, those thirty or so seconds replicated around the world thousands of times and adding up to whole years of boredom. The irony is funny, but at the same time there's an undertone that security should really just be for the tanned and turbanned. It's the annoyance of guys who look a bit like Peter Ackroyd at having to take their shoes off at Heathrow for less than a minute - what now? I don't believe this - and their luggage innumerate wives (I love the social precision of the announcements that make it quite explicit that "a lady's handbag" constitutes one item). They see the strict division of airport space (before and after security) as an encroachment of the police state, without realising that all public spaces (and a good few private ones) are already pretty much parcelled out for various types of social utility. That's the good thing about the use of space in airports; the honesty is refreshing. Incidentally, on the pre- and post-security divide, why is it always a strikingly nicer environment after security? They've got you by then - at this point, you're either ending your visit in a plane, a van, or a bag. You wouldn't have thought they'd have bothered by then, but seemingly without fail it's lighter, more open, and generally less of a scrum.
As for airports being uniform... I've seen enough American ones to pick out the differences. Sacramento's two terminals seem to be embodying some kind of historical tension, one of them a typical NorCal hippy child of the sixties, the other all chrome and glass. The McNamara terminal at Detroit Fort Wayne offers the rare experience of standing at one end of a room and not being able to see the other; it's about 1.3 miles long, a gigantic parody of a baronial banquet hall (it's disappointing to get to the other side and find there isn't a huge pig on a spit, revolving in front of the plate glass, although the salt could easily be passed by the internal monorail). Passport control at San Francisco is weirdly quiet; Las Vegas, inevitably, has slot machines at departures and the huge windows on the desert just seem like cinema. As for the UK, this is where I stick up for Heathrow again, as opposed to its less well-to-do sibling Gatwick. My experiences of Heathrow (admittedly, mostly limited to Terminal 3) have all been pretty fair. Gatwick, if you want to get psychogeographical about it, seems to be at some confluence of bad juju and worse weather (flying into there in January, we descended right into the middle of a storm so bad that planes on the ground were refusing to take off , leaving us to make numerous futile, bumpy and vomitous approaches for half an hour). Heathrow, by both M4 and underground, acts as the gateway to London; Gatwick seems to be simultaneously in the middle of nowhere and handy for Croydon. The shuttle buses are a spectacular rip off, even for airport transport; my wife and I once paid £5 to be taken around a corner before disembarking at a hotel from which we could quite clearly see our original bus stop. We walked back the next day, one area in which Gatwick scores over the siege mentality of Heathrow - they'd still let the trojan horse in, though, because it was on wheels. What Gatwick need to do now (as if there were any real competition between the two) is capitalise on the terminal 5 debacle, which they've already started with their South Terminal redevelopment. If enough of us ask, they'll put in Quasar.
One of the effects of the embarrassment over Terminal 5 has been to entrench even more deeply a widespread scorn of Heathrow in general, one which I've always found rather unfair. In fact, I rather like airports. The first sentence of Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul suggests that "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport,'" which is witty enough, but also misses the point. Airports are never going to be architectural white knuckle rides, for two reasons (conveniently enough, arrivals and departures). Arrivals: no tourist economy is going to survive a situation whereby the airport is more fantastically exciting than the country outside (hence, no log flume at LAX or Quasar at Gatwick, notwithstanding the immediate appeal of thirty people lumbering around a smoky room with their hand luggage). Departures: let's not forget that the anodyne aesthetics of the airport are really a prelude to what remains the spectacular experience of actually taking off (hardened travellers with their nerves cauterised by enough air miles to take them to the moon might consider times when the plane has lurched unexpectedly when 'scaping the surly bonds of earth to punch god on the nose) and being a stupid height above the ground. In fact, it's at the airport ends when flight becomes most interesting, when the pedestrian view of the landscape suddenly unfolds into panoptic mode, when it turns from a postcard into a map.
The other accusations are that airports are boring and uniform. But, with the exception of seven hours in Chicago O'Hare (a reflection on the sheer mass of time waiting, not on O'Hare itself, although they generally need better bookshops), I can't remember ever being bored in an airport. This may be down to the fact that I've usually got something to read, but I prefer to think that it's the influence of a steady and ambient tension. How boring can a place be when there are people walking around with guns? And, furthermore, walking around with guns because there may be other people with guns, or something more devastating? In his recent (and rather controversial) collection The Second Plane, Martin Amis makes the observation that global terrorism really led to a rise in its opposite - global tedium, as we all spend longer waiting in the same lines to be asked the same questions, those thirty or so seconds replicated around the world thousands of times and adding up to whole years of boredom. The irony is funny, but at the same time there's an undertone that security should really just be for the tanned and turbanned. It's the annoyance of guys who look a bit like Peter Ackroyd at having to take their shoes off at Heathrow for less than a minute - what now? I don't believe this - and their luggage innumerate wives (I love the social precision of the announcements that make it quite explicit that "a lady's handbag" constitutes one item). They see the strict division of airport space (before and after security) as an encroachment of the police state, without realising that all public spaces (and a good few private ones) are already pretty much parcelled out for various types of social utility. That's the good thing about the use of space in airports; the honesty is refreshing. Incidentally, on the pre- and post-security divide, why is it always a strikingly nicer environment after security? They've got you by then - at this point, you're either ending your visit in a plane, a van, or a bag. You wouldn't have thought they'd have bothered by then, but seemingly without fail it's lighter, more open, and generally less of a scrum.
As for airports being uniform... I've seen enough American ones to pick out the differences. Sacramento's two terminals seem to be embodying some kind of historical tension, one of them a typical NorCal hippy child of the sixties, the other all chrome and glass. The McNamara terminal at Detroit Fort Wayne offers the rare experience of standing at one end of a room and not being able to see the other; it's about 1.3 miles long, a gigantic parody of a baronial banquet hall (it's disappointing to get to the other side and find there isn't a huge pig on a spit, revolving in front of the plate glass, although the salt could easily be passed by the internal monorail). Passport control at San Francisco is weirdly quiet; Las Vegas, inevitably, has slot machines at departures and the huge windows on the desert just seem like cinema. As for the UK, this is where I stick up for Heathrow again, as opposed to its less well-to-do sibling Gatwick. My experiences of Heathrow (admittedly, mostly limited to Terminal 3) have all been pretty fair. Gatwick, if you want to get psychogeographical about it, seems to be at some confluence of bad juju and worse weather (flying into there in January, we descended right into the middle of a storm so bad that planes on the ground were refusing to take off , leaving us to make numerous futile, bumpy and vomitous approaches for half an hour). Heathrow, by both M4 and underground, acts as the gateway to London; Gatwick seems to be simultaneously in the middle of nowhere and handy for Croydon. The shuttle buses are a spectacular rip off, even for airport transport; my wife and I once paid £5 to be taken around a corner before disembarking at a hotel from which we could quite clearly see our original bus stop. We walked back the next day, one area in which Gatwick scores over the siege mentality of Heathrow - they'd still let the trojan horse in, though, because it was on wheels. What Gatwick need to do now (as if there were any real competition between the two) is capitalise on the terminal 5 debacle, which they've already started with their South Terminal redevelopment. If enough of us ask, they'll put in Quasar.
