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| Mayor of London says UK's biggest airport should be turned into new city The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has set out a detailed vision for transforming London into the greatest economic powerhouse of the 21st century, with a new airport to complement the new seaport about to open in the Thames estuary, new road and rail connections to boost the economy of east London, Kent and Essex and the opportunity for a new town in west London housing up to 250,000 people on land currently occupied by Heathrow Airport.spliter Speaking at City Hall the Mayor said that connectivity was essential to participation in the global economy and to ensuring that a city with a growing population could offer jobs and prosperity to its people. He outlined the details of an extensive, independently peer-reviewed investigation that has been carried out by his team at Transport for London over the last year into the potential options for new aviation capacity. This demonstrates conclusively that there are three optimal locations for a new airport: on the Isle of Grain in north Kent; at Stansted; or on an artificial island in the middle of the Thames estuary. He announced that he would be submitting detailed proposals for all three sites to the Davies Commission later in the week. He also revealed the enormous potential economic benefits of building a new hub airport, which he confirmed would be able to support more than 375,000 new jobs by 2050 and add £742bn to the value of goods and services produced in the UK. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: "Ambitious cities all over the world are already stealing a march on us and putting themselves in a position to eat London's breakfast, lunch and dinner by constructing mega airports that plug them directly into the global supply chains that we need to be part of. Those cities have moved heaven and earth to locate their airports away from their major centres of population, in areas where they have been able to build airports with four runways or more. For London and the wider UK to remain competitive we have to build an airport capable of emulating that scale of growth. Anyone who believes there would be the space to do that at Heathrow, which already blights the lives of hundreds of thousands of Londoners, is quite simply crackers." New analysis released by the Mayor reveals that only a four runway hub airport would allow London to reach the emerging markets of the world. It would potentially quadruple the number of destinations London serves in China and South America, destinations which can currently only be reached from the UK by travelling through rival hubs in Europe, and add another fifty per cent more destinations in the United States. A single hub airport would also restore domestic routes to nine cities across the UK, many of which are currently only served by Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, which already increasingly boasts of being the UK's leading hub airport. Restoring those routes would allow the UK's entrepreneurs and manufacturers to trade with the rest of the world regardless of where they were based. The Mayor also addressed the future of west London once Heathrow airport was moved to a new site to the east of the capital. With four tube stations, Crossrail and National Rail connections, and the space and infrastructure to generate up to 100,000 new homes that London badly needs, the site would offer hope to millions of Londoners increasingly priced out of decent accommodation. The scale would be similar to developing an entire new borough of London in one of the most dynamic, economically vibrant and accessible areas of the capital; with the potential to attract tens of thousands of jobs in an array of different sectors. While some workers at Heathrow would relocate to the new airport, many others would find work on a newly developed Heathrow. A new hub airport, in a proper location, would release the huge development potential that is buried beneath the tarmac at Heathrow, creating thousands of new jobs. write your comments about the article :: © 2013 Construction News :: home page |