Six London Airports That Never Got Off The Ground

Last Updated 05 February 2025

Six London Airports That Never Got Off The Ground

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A Handley Page flying over Wormwood Scrubs prison
The author is aware that Handley Page HP42s weren't around till almost 10 years after the Wormwood Scrubs airport suggestion was put forward. What can I say; I like Handley Page HP42s. Image: Chmee2 via creative commons

As plans for a third runway at Heathrow are dusted off yet again, we look at six locations (or, depending on how you count, a good deal more) where an airport for London was mooted, but never got off the ground.

1. Wormwood Scrubs (suggested 1922)

The flat, open expanse of Wormwood Scrubs in west London always leant itself to aviation. In 1910, a London to Manchester air race departed from this spot and two years later a huge airship hangar was erected here.

Come 1922, as alternatives to Croydon Airport were being run up the flagpole, Wormwood Scrubs was back in the spotlight. That November, The Scotsman newspaper reported that various companies had been invited to send an airliner to Wormwood Scrubs, loaded up with passengers and cargo, to land and take off again in front of an advisory board.

"Handley Page Transport Ltd," wrote the Scotsman, "will dispatch a machine with 12 passengers and an equivalent weight from Croydon at 9.30am [17 November 1922]. The machine should land at Wormwood Scrubs ten minutes later."

Some pilots did raise a couple of trifling concerns about using Wormwood Scrubs as an airport. 1. "It is not big enough" and 2. "Highly dangerous". It's unclear if that Handley Page test ever happened although we would add a third concern to the pilots'; had an airport ever been built here, certain emboldened felons would've surely been tempted to make a getaway by air a la Paddington 2.

A busy Waterloo station
To be fair Waterloo station doesn't look unlike an airport now. Image: Londonist

2. Waterloo station (suggested 1923)

Croydon Airport was the UK's first official international airport, though not everyone believed it warranted this honour. Gripes included dastardly fog, compounded by its position at the foot of the North Downs — prompting many an accident — and the lack of a direct train to the airport which was itself nine-and-a-half miles as the crow flies from central London.

"I am not at all proud of it," said aviation bigwig Sir W Sefton Brancker in June 1923, "I am ashamed of it." But Brancker had a cunning plan. "Croydon will last as the chief airport until such time as we can raise sufficient money to build a roof over Waterloo station and have an aerodrome in London."

It'd be another 23 years until Croydon was demoted from being London's premier airport, and it was Heathrow, not Waterloo, which took up the mantle. Heathrow, by the way, is over 14 miles from central London.

A stately house with an immaculate lawn
Gunnersbury Park: Can't help but think this lawn would look better with a Boeing parked on it. Image: Jim Linwood via creative commons

3. Gunnersbury Park... and the Thames (suggested 1923)

"The length of run so provided would, with the existing type of aircraft, be insufficient, while the cost would be prohibitive." That's what the Civil Aviation Board concluded on the matter of a Waterloo station airport — though it didn't rule it out entirely for the future. Still, Waterloo had been one of 12 suggested locations for a new airport in 1923.

Other sites which were inspected from the air for this purpose included Cricklewood and Hendon (both already had aerodromes), and also Gunnersbury Park. Off the back of this, it was recommended that Gunnersbury Park be bought for £150,000 for future possible aviation use, though presumably that never happened.

We're unsure what all 12 sites considered were, although another (quite serious) suggestion at the time was to make all airliners amphibious, and have them land on the Thames at Westminster when weather permitted. That conjures up images from another blockbuster movie, namely Sully.

Horses on Rotten Row
Come to think of it, Rotten Row would make a decent runway... Image: Matt Brown/Londonist

4. Hyde Park (suggested 1926)

Parks were seen as fair game by aviation's top brass in the 1920s. Frederick Handley Page (pioneer of the aforementioned Handley Page Transport Ltd), along with the MP Lord Allen Algernon Bathurst Apsley, wanted to turn part of Hyde Park into an aerodrome. "Large areas of Hyde Park are unfrequented," said Apsley in October 1926, "and the establishment of a small aerodrome in one of these areas would provide an additional attraction to the place." Read more about it in this article.

5. King's Cross station (suggested 1931)

In its nascent days Croydon Airport had been nicknamed the 'Aerial Charing Cross' but in 1931 the architect Charles Glover presented his plans for an 'Aerial King's Cross', and he wasn't kidding either.

Fans of 'unbuilt London' content will be familiar with Glover's cartwheel-shaped set of airport runways which he proposed to perch on top of a skyscraper, 120 feet above railway sidings at King's Cross.

Passengers would ascend to their plane from street level elevators. For some reason, the chaotic-eight-way-mind-fuck-of-an-airport-in-the-middle-of-one-of-the-world's-most-populated-cities never came to fruition, although the concept was kicked about for at least a couple of years. In 1933 a company was formed under the title Central Air Ports, Ltd. Its chairman, Alfred Butt blithely claimed "the scheme is quite practicable," casually slipping in some tweaked measurements: "if a real skyscraper could be built of a height of, say, 800ft, the top of it would be clear of most London fogs." Nice try, Butt.

A map of various Thames Estuary airports
No fewer than five Thames Estuary airports have been mooted. Image: OS OpenData

6. Thames Estuary (suggested since 1943)

'Boris Island' was a concept long before the former Mayor of London was a (shudder) glint in Stanley's eye. Aircraft designer Frederick George Miles first put forward the notion of an airport between Cliffe and Allhallows in 1943, which was to have three runways from the outset. It didn't happen but the thought that a London airport which was relatively out in the sticks, and could therefore operate 24/7, stuck around.

In 1958 the MP Richard Harris complained that Heathrow Airport should be moved outright to "a coastal area which is much better fitted to take some of these new, screaming monsters which frighten the life out of our constituents."

There followed various proposals to build an airport in the Thames Estuary at Grain, Maplin Sands (an ambitious idea that included a whole new town being built, but was scrapped by the Labour government in 1974) and off the Isle of Sheppey.

In 2008, then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson revisited the concept of an airport off Sheppey, built on an artificial island in the eerily-named Shivering Sands. It was turned down in its first iteration in 2009, and again in 2014 when it rebranded as London Britannia Airport. Another Johnson-touted project — called Thames Hub Airport, and which, like an earlier idea, was to be sited on the Isle of Grain — was also nixed in 2014. Protestors were glad to see the back of what had been labelled a "bizarre proposal".