Mayor’s airport plan likened to ‘Hitler vision’

London Evening Standard/London

A leading architect yesterday attacked Boris Johnson’s “mad” plan to build a £65bn airport on the Thames Estuary and compared it to a project that Adolf Hitler might have dreamed up.

Sir Terry Farrell, who has designed some of the world’s largest airports and rail stations, said the scale of the proposed four-runway project would be unprecedented in Britain and made the government’s HS2 high-speed rail project “look like chicken feed”.

The mayor yesterday underlined his commitment to an estuary airport by naming Sir Norman Foster’s Isle of Grain plan as his first choice.

Expansion at Stansted was his second choice with a “Boris island” in the outer estuary third.

He also wants to shut Heathrow at a cost of £15bn and create a new London borough for 250,000 residents.

Sir Terry’s comments will escalate the tension between Heathrow, Stansted and Gatwick as they go public with their plans to solve London’s aviation capacity crisis this week.

Sir Terry, who is working on Gatwick’s bid to build a second runway, told the Standard: “When people say that you have got to have vision, well Hitler had vision.

“Vision can be a madness where you get so obsessed you throw everything you have got on the roulette table and hope you got it right.”

He said closing Heathrow and moving the predominant London airport to the eastern extreme would be “flipping London”, adding: “In that case people say you could make Heathrow a new town. It makes HS2 look like chicken feed. It’s going to be the biggest project the UK has ever done in its history.”

Sir Terry was approached by the mayor to work on his estuary airport plan but turned the work down. The architect was the chief planner of estuary regeneration scheme the Thames Gateway and has designed South Korea’s acclaimed hub airport at Incheon and the world’s biggest rail station in Guangzhou, China.

His buildings in London include the MI6 headquarters, Charing Cross station and the Home Office.

Sir Terry, who is also a member of the mayor’s design panel, added: “The obvious political solution is that he (Boris Johnson) wants the airport to go somewhere that is not in his constituency — out of his voters’ territory.”

Last week the architect was hired by Gatwick to promote its proposal to build a second runway. It is part of a grand plan to link Gatwick to two other two-runway airports, Heathrow and Stansted.