The British are renowned for being polite hosts. But the tendency of one community to pause their conversations, put down their pints of beer or freeze-frame their prayers and school lessons every time someone leaves or enters the country is perhaps taking good manners too far. Next time you fly in or out of Heathrow, spare a thought for the residents of the neighbourhoods that surround the world’s busiest airport. You can be certain that the drone of your aeroplane’s engines will test their manners by forcing someone to repeat what they have just said, turn up the television, close the book they have been reading or give up on fresh air by closing a window.
With an aeroplane taking off or landing every 60-90 seconds during peak hours, those living under Heathrow’s flight path could be forgiven for ruing the day the runways were built. And with about 16 night flights between 11.30pm and 6am, residents could also be forgiven for swallowing more than their fair share of sleeping pills. In fact, they could be forgiven for stuffing the pills directly into their ear canals.
Gautam Malkani: Heathrow journal
Gautam Malkani is an FT journalist and author of “Londonstani”. Read his exclusive interactive online journal about investigating the tangled relationship between Heathrow airport and Hounslow. Click here
Instead, with a few headline-making exceptions that perhaps prove the rule, Heathrow and its surrounding community have existed in relative harmony since it opened in 1946, thanks to a state of co-dependence and a physical proximity that is unique among the world’s major hub airports. So embedded is the airport in the surrounding neighbourhoods of Hounslow, Hillingdon, Southall and Slough that the areas are often referred to as the Heathrow village. And while the roar of aircraft engines may seem deafening, and jet fuel and road traffic may make the air pollution seem worse than the noise pollution, the airport nevertheless provides the village with something residents are grateful for: jobs. Some 68,400 to be precise - rising to nearly 100,000 if you include indirect employment.
Indeed, some residents admit to actually liking the aircraft noise, as if what they are hearing is the ker-ching of a thousand local cash tills. Similarly, while the acronym ATM may in most places refer to automated teller machines, in the aviation-savvy Heathrow village the letters are as likely to stand for air traffic movements. And as residents sometimes joke, both types of ATM inject money into the local economy.
Sipping a lemonade in a pub behind Brentford football stadium, Mukhtar Yahya, a 31-year-old member of British Airways ground staff, recalls growing up under the flight path. “I’ve lived with aircraft noise all my life and I’m happy with the airport,” he says. “I used to stand out in the back garden with my brothers and sisters in the summer evenings and identify different tail signs.”
Now that they have all grown up and moved out of their parents’ house in Hounslow West, Yahya and his siblings work together in the 3,032-acre site that houses Heathrow Airport. Two of his three brothers work, like him, for British Airways - one is a baggage handler, the other is a cabin crew member. Both his sisters work in immigration. His third brother and father are former employees at the airport while his two brothers-in-law are also based there. Last month, a niece started work at Terminal 3. Indeed, Yahya is living proof that when airport workers talk of the “Heathrow family”, they are not always speaking metaphorically.
Yahya joined British Airways seven months ago, largely because he had grown accustomed over the years to the discounted flights employees and their relatives are entitled to. “I’ve been travelling on cheap flights all my life and wanted to start travelling again. When I went for the job interview one of the chaps asked me what my experience of the airport was and when I told him how many of my family members were working there, they said something like ‘You’ve got about 100 years’ experience.’”
Yahya’s father got his first job with British Airways in 1969, six years after emigrating from Pakistan. As the engine fuelling one of London’s growing local economies, the airport eventually became an obvious place for immigrants to seek employment, although many people originally settled in the area because of the factories that were nearby at the time.
Although Heathrow is in neighbouring Hillingdon, the borough of Hounslow is the largest contributor to the airport’s workforce, with 11,400 on-site employees. That represents about one employee for every eight households or around 5 per cent of the borough’s population. According to the 2001 census, more than 35 per cent of Hounslow’s population are from an ethnic minority - including 22 per cent of Indian or Pakistani origin. In Heston and Cranford to the north-west of the borough, “ethnic minority” is a nonsense because the term applies to 64 per cent of the population.
Yahya’s affection for the airport does not deafen him to complaints about the negative impact it can have on residents’ lives. “All the planes and cars spew out their various exhaust fumes and you are liable to be stuck in a traffic jam pretty much any part of the day,” he says. But for him, the pluses outweigh the minuses. As well as jobs and the fulfilment of economic needs, he emphasises the camaraderie among workers and how Heathrow caters for residents’ social needs by providing a village atmosphere that contrasts sharply with the urban alienation of the capital city that the airport serves. Most recently, for example, he recalls finding out that someone he plays football with also works at the airport. “I’d just finished work the other day and I bumped into him. It turns out he’s an engineer and he was fixing a luggage belt.”
Briefly turning his attention to another football match - this time on the pub’s TV - he then recalls how his sister’s wedding reception was held in the Hilton at Heathrow’s Terminal 4 (she was working for BA in Islamabad at the time, while her husband-to-be worked at Heathrow). The image of airport taxis parked alongside garlanded wedding cars is not uncommon. Drive along the A4 on any Saturday night during the Indian nuptial season and the ballrooms of the Sheratons, Hiltons, Marriotts and Ramadas will be filled with dinner suits and saris, the sound of bhangra music and dhol drums drowning out the Boeing 747s overhead. This complementary fit between the demands of the local Indian wedding market and the ample supply of hotel banqueting facilities is an example of how Heathrow’s economic and social infrastructures often feed off each other in ways that town planners and environmental managers could never have predicted.
Nevertheless, Heathrow’s cross-cutting of economic and familial networks placed Yahya in a tricky spot over the summer. More than 700 BA flights were cancelled at the height of the holiday season by a so-called wildcat strike by some of the airline’s baggage handlers and other ground staff. Yahya decided to carry on working. His actions were supported by one brother, who works in cabin crew, while his other brother who works as a baggage handler couldn’t believe it when he found out. “One agreed with me and one disagreed with me,” says Yahya.
The strike, which cost the airline up to £45m, was a rare example of the harmonious relationship between the airport and its village breaking down. BA’s baggage handlers walked out in sympathy with workers sacked from Gate Gourmet, the catering company owned by US private equity house Texas Pacific that supplies BA with on-flight meals and which evolved out of what used to be the airline’s in-house catering operation until 10 years ago. On August 10, 667 Gate Gourmet employees were sacked by megaphone in the company’s canteen. The vast majority were Asian women and images of them subsequently picketing in their saris and salwar kameezes captured the imagination of a nation that had hitherto believed such solidarity among workers died with the decimation of another type of industrial village - England’s mining towns.
Gate Gourmet’s management argued that the workers were dismissed because they had taken part in an illegal strike amid a broader industrial dispute as the company attempted to “change outdated and inefficient working practices”. But the company underestimated the outrage that would be prompted by the mass sacking of workers who had toiled away in repetitive jobs for low pay. Moreover, management underestimated the support the sacked staff would attract from the whole airport fraternity and the wider trade union movement - which memorably sent grey-suited officials from the Transport and General Workers’ Union to attend meetings in the hall of a local Sikh gurdwara usually reserved for prayers.
Local gurdwaras supplied some of the food being handed out to the sacked catering workers picketing on a grassy knoll near Terminal 4 on a sunny morning in September. The plight of the Gate Gourmet workers may no longer be the focus of the world’s media or attract corny headlines about saris, samosas and solidarity, but a group of well over 100 of them still attracted honks of support from airport employees driving past. And the picketers still jeered when those driving past were in Gate Gourmet trucks.
One of the few women in western dress (a denim jacket and jeans) laments the fact that the sacked Gate Gourmet workers have lost more than just their jobs. “Being in there was like being in a big family,” she says. “Some people wouldn’t mind being called aunty and if there’s a wedding or anything we all go together. We used to find excuses to go round to each others’ houses.”
Mick Allen, a driver for Gate Gourmet for seven and a half of his 11 years working at Heathrow, adds: “There are lots of BA guys that have got cousins, uncles, brothers that work here. After all, this was originally a BA operation.”
But family connections aside, the various bonds between employees at Heathrow also include networks of former colleagues who have previously worked together in different parts of the airport. Indeed Alan Keen, the MP for nearby Feltham and Heston (whose wife Ann is the MP for neighbouring Brentford and Isleworth), says the significance of family ties can be overstated: “The Punjabi airport community is the closest parallel to the old mining communities, but the BA baggage handlers were mainly white. There’s always been strong trade union activity at Heathrow, so it wasn’t people’s uncles coming off the [baggage] ramps in sympathy.”
Indeed, despite the media’s fixation on saris and turbans, the Gate Gourmet dispute highlights how the ties uniting airport workers span all races and religions. One employee at the British Airports Authority (BAA) puts some of these ties down to the demands of shift work. “Because people are working anti-social hours you forge close ties with other people. It doesn’t take long to find someone who’s married to someone else at the airport.”
After booing another Gate Gourmet truck, 49-year-old Satpal Sangha, who has worked for the company for eight of his 15 years at the airport, also downplays the significance of racial and religious ties and instead emphasises the comradeship that exists between all co-workers. “Most of the leaders [of the BA strikers] were English lads anyway,” he says. As he speaks, another Gate Gourmet truck absorbs its share of abuse. Sangha recognises the driver. “I’ve known that fellow since the age of 18,” he says. “I used to class him as my white brother.”
Viewed in the context of Heathrow’s village dynamics, the industrial dispute at Gate Gourmet highlights the breakdown that can occur when the delicate state of co-dependence between the airport and its community is betrayed. The economic trade-off between a blighted living environment on the one hand and a living wage on the other hand simply collapsed as that other hand was withdrawn.
Bryan Sobey, the president of the Harmondsworth and Sipson Residents’ Association, who worked at Heathrow for 35 years before retiring, says tensions between the airport and the community have intensified during the past decade. To understand why, he points back to the fragile state of co-dependence. “Certainly as far as other major airports around the world are concerned, I think it’s unlikely anyone could match Heathrow for having homes, schools and everything within walking distance from the airport. But it’s the deal west London has done with Heathrow. We can put up with so much aircraft noise because we’re getting a sound economy and actual jobs in return. That’s the deal people who live close to the airport have done with it in their minds. Tensions have risen in the last decade because people feel the airport’s attitude has changed.”
The essence of that perceived betrayal is the airport’s relentless physical expansion, ongoing job cuts and the trend towards outsourcing non-core activities such as catering - which has resulted in more intermediary parties such as Gate Gourmet being positioned within the fundamental airport-community deal.
Sitting in a house he bought in 1951 and which would be demolished should BAA ever get the go-ahead to expand beyond the fifth terminal due to open in 2008, Sobey explains: “From 1953 to the 1980s we had continual building around the airport as the villages grew up. But now the only way the airport can expand is to kick those villages down. I suppose the real change came with the privatisation of BAA and of the national airlines. They started looking to expand to make more profits and at that point the airport went from being a friendly neighbour to a distinct threat - the good old airport suddenly became a wicked uncle.”
It follows that affection for the airport is strongest among those who still feel the hand of the old, pre-privatisation paternalism rather than the margin squeezes of a struggling aviation industry.
A 10-minute drive away from the Gate Gourmet picket lies a very different sight. A 650-acre construction site to be precise, where the £4.2bn project to build the fifth terminal is taking shape. Although incomplete, the sleek glass building is a world away from the airport’s now-ageing terminals 1, 2 and 3 and the catering warehouses that surround it. And, as if symbolising some kind of Babel-like aspiration, a new air traffic control tower reaches 47 metres into the sky. Not only are there jobs aplenty among the fleets of diggers, cranes and cement mixers that work yards from the aeroplanes in the main airport, but they are highly skilled jobs that contrast sharply with the catering, cleaning and security posts typically filled by local residents. In place of trade union banners, there are cringe-inducing posters on fences that read: “History in the making: One day you’ll be proud to say ‘I built Terminal Five.’”
The message has clearly got through to Matthew Hennesy, a 19-year-old apprentice with BDL, a wall and ceiling contractor that is one of 320 companies working on the site. “When friends ask me “Where do you work?” I’m quite proud to say I work on Terminal Five. At the moment it’s the second biggest construction site in Europe. It’s breathtaking. This is just immense.”
At West Thames College’s Skills Centre, set up with investment from BAA, students Nick Rose and Lokesh Kumar, 26 and 27 respectively, hold the airport in the same high regard. “When I go to north London clubbing and people ask where I’m from, I don’t say Staines, I say Heathrow,” says Rose. “It’s a great place to live because there’s always local jobs. Once you’ve got your foot in the door you’re set up for life.” The Gate Gourmet workers may not agree with him, but the importance of the airport and facilities such as the vocational training centre to local employment opportunities should not be dismissed in an area where the labour supply is tight - despite unemployment levels that are slightly above London’s average - because of a shortage of skills.
The skills centre, which is one of numerous tie-ups between BAA and local authorities and educational establishments, is housed in a former secondary school. As Rose and Kumar practise working copper pipes into shape as part of a plumbing course, their friend Adam Johnson, a 17-year-old from Cranford, joins in: “I live on an estate where there’s quite a few old people who complain about the airport. But look at the jobs it creates. Heathrow’s like Marmite: you either love it or you hate it.”
The love-hate relationship between Heathrow and its village has made the politics of the airport particularly thorny for local authorities assessing their stance on the myriad issues surrounding it. These include calls for further airport-funded insulation and ventilation systems for local schools and homes, and government proposals for changes such as an increase in night flights, the ending of alternation between Heathrow’s two runways (where landing and taking off are switched at different times of the day to give residents a break), a third runway and possibly a sixth terminal.
To make the arguments even more emotive, the sense of betrayal among some residents is heightened because BAA said that it would not need another runway when it was lobbying for Terminal 5. But proponents of further expansion say it is necessary if Heathrow is to remain Europe’s main hub airport. They argue that losing this position to Amsterdam, Paris or Frankfurt would result in the kind of industrial and social decline associated with mining and docklands areas. “If we are not careful we will do in west London what we did in east London when we assumed the docks would last forever,” warns Clive Soley, campaign director of lobby group Future Heathrow and a former local MP.
But others point out that you do not need a hub airport to sustain a village with low unemployment - a major airport will do fine and there is no risk of Heathrow losing that position. “Heathrow as a hub airport doesn’t bring benefits to us,” says Abdu’Rashid Craig, head of economic development at Hounslow Council. “The only people who benefit are retailers in the terminals.”
Craig also points to the wider, long-term implications of over-dependence on an airport allowed to dominate the local economy and crowd out the development of other industries by absorbing available labour and raising land values. “Where Heathrow saved Hounslow was in the way the long-term impact of the restructuring of manufacturing wasn’t felt here, and I don’t think we should forget that,” he says. “But we are the supplier of low-skilled, low-paid labour. How long can expansion go on?”
Formally announcing Hounslow Council’s opposition to a third runway last month, councillor Ruth Cadbury said: “We recognise the economic benefits that Heathrow brings to the area but it’s absolutely clear that the airport has reached the limit of its sustainable development.”
The challenge for Heathrow is to stretch that limit and modernise without betraying the community it has grown up with. Around the perimeter of the Terminal 5 site lies a symbol of how intractable that challenge is: twin rivers that once ran across the site, but which BAA has now diverted into specially constructed channels in return for government approval for the expansion. It was not the first time the airport had to alter the course of the rivers, having previously diverted one so that it ran partly underground. Unfortunately a subterranean runway is not an option.
Gautam Malkani is the author of “Londonstani”, to be published next year by Fourth Estate
Read Gautam Malkani’s interactive online journal on www.ft.com/malkani
