LCEN Creation Time walk Heathrow Runway 3

On Saturday September 5 the London Churches Environmental Network held its second Creation Time walk. 40 pilgrims met at St. Anselm's Church in Hayes for a short service and refreshments. Our reading from Acts 27 showed that St. Paul experienced controversy and disagreement during his travels, and our purpose was to learn more about a current controversy, by walking along the course of the proposed northern extension to Heathrow Airport, along Runway 3.

Our party included all ages, members of different denominations, people from more distant parts of London (e.g. Enfield and Camberwell), one dog, two scooters, and we were joined by members of Climate Rush and A Rocha.

Climate Rush were starting their own pilgrimage at Sipson. During September they visited places across Southern England where there are current environmental concerns, or examples of good environmental practice which should be emulated, and they finish their journey in Totnes, a Transition Town.

A Rocha are a Christian environmental organisation, based in Southall, where they restored derelict land once owned by British Gas to create the Minet Country Park, and now run Eco-Congregation and the Living Waterways project.

From the church we crossed the Grand Union Canal and Brunel's railway line from Paddington to Bristol and beyond, and entered Nestlé's Avenue. We passed the London Motor Museum, which features American cars of the 1950's and 1960's. Relics of an extravagant, irresponsible and unsustainable age, but flamboyant and attractive to their devotees. A reminder that air travel is not the only form of travel that needs scrutiny and improvement. A museum is the best place for them!

We then passed Nestlé's and smelt coffee in the air. Were we smelling one of their few Fair Trade products or was it one of their standard products from a more suspect source? We could not tell.

We went below the M4 in a subway, past St. Dunstan's Church and crossed Cranford Park. We began to see a stream of aircraft landing from the east, across Hounslow and Cranford. In Cranford Lane we met John McDonnell, the MP for Hayes & Harlington, who knew of our walk and had looked for us as he travelled between other engagements. We went through Harlington, and crossed the proposed boundary to enter the site of the Heathrow extension*.

* I am torn between keeping the text simple, and keeping the text honest. I have chosen to keep the text simple, by omitting "proposed". Throughout, any reference to the airfield site and its boundary is to the proposed airfield site and its boundary.

As a physical entity, Harlington will remain, on the eastern edge of the airport, with its William Byrd School right in line with the runway and under the flight-path, a situation that cannot be described as "unaffected".

As we went along Sipson Lane and Harmondsworth Lane we noticed some industrial activity – gravel was being extracted in one place, and Sita were using one pit left from previous extraction for land-fill, and were landscaping another. Gravel is an extractive industry – after extraction what we have left is a hole in the ground. A parable about our life on the earth – we cannot continue to use all its resources unsustainably – the resources of materials and fuel God has given us may be for our use, but they are for all of humanity, both today and future generations. We need to be more restrained about what we use, and more imaginative about how we use it again, or else we will be faced with many more holes in the ground.

At Sipson we were invited into Climate Rush's camp, a Greenpeace site with multiple owners and a vegetable patch, and we met Climate Suffragettes of both sexes and saw the 3 horses and carts they are using on their journey.

All of Sipson falls in the airfield extension and faces compulsory purchase and demolition, including one church, the Heathrow Primary School (with its outstanding Ofsted report and its Walk (to school) once a Week campaign) and the William IV public house.

We crossed the motorway link between the M4 and the airport. Unwittingly we were also crossing the Heathrow rail link which is in a tunnel. Surprisingly there are no plans for rail access to Terminal 6 and Runway 3, which will be served by road transport alone. Road traffic to Heathrow and surface transport servicing it already have serious effects on air quality – why is this possibility to use a less damaging alternative being missed?

After Sipson we left the airfield site, and entered Harmondsworth for lunch and for a tour of St. Mary's Church. We learned that a church had first been established at Harmondsworth in 1067, a year after the Norman Conquest, by monks from Rouen in Normandy. The present church was built mostly from C12 to C16 in brick and flint, and is adjacent to a modern church hall. The churchyard borders a tithe barn, potentially as attractive as the tithe barns in the National Trust's hands at Coggeshall and Great Coxwell, but at risk now, and more greatly so in the future. The village of Harmondsworth, its church, barn and businesses will be surrounded on 3 sides by the airport – it will remain physically but will become uninhabitable and isolated.

Some of our group left at Harmondsworth – the remainder went through the churchyard into Harmondsworth Moor. This was once the site of derelict gravel works, and is adjacent to new offices British Airways moved into at Waterside. During this move they restored the moor to create a nature reserve and they now manage it – during the working week you can often see British Airways' runners doing a circuit of the lake there.

On Harmondsworth Moor during our visit we saw swans, Brent geese and coots on Swan Lake – we were back on the airfield extension with a vengeance, as the course of the runway is through Swan Lake, 250 yards south of the M4, and 350 yards away from housing in West Drayton.

We saw aircraft taking off to the west towards Windsor, and saw glimpses of Terminal 5, and of Grundon's incinerator at Colnbrook. This is currently for clinical waste, but there are proposals for it to take a wider range of waste in an "energy-from-waste" project.

We passed alongside the River Colne, the traditional boundary between Middlesex and Buckinghamshire, and went under the M4 near its junction with the M25 – a large structure which shows the demand construction makes for minerals (not just the gravel we had seen being extracted earlier). We passed some riding tables as we left the park and continued to West Drayton to catch buses or trains back to Hayes or beyond.

What can we conclude from our walk? Our main task was the Runway 3 proposal but we did notice some other environmental and social responsibility topics in passing. We are not covering these here, but please remember them and consider them privately.

Conclusions

Travel is part of our lives, and always has been, as our reading on St. Paul and the monks from Rouen's journey to Harmondsworth show. The priests at the churches we visited are from the Seychelles and Nigeria, which shows how the English church benefits from its contacts with the outside world. The diverse character of the shops in Hayes High St. and the smell of coffee outside Nestlé's show how English life benefits from its trade with the outside world.

We need to travel and trade, and in making the proposal to extend Heathrow the airport authorities and airlines are responding to the need they perceive. They have developed an economic case which they consider justifies expansion.

A question for BAA and the airlines

Does the economic case for expansion take into account all the environmental costs that our walk has identified? These are substantial – calculations are easy to do once you have made assumptions, but it is difficult to make these honestly and transparently. What is the cost and value of disturbed nights, interrupted lessons, daytime noise, heritage, wildlife, congestion and air pollution on the ground, and isolation and demolition of communities?

Some would doubt whether it is possible to make any honest calculation, and we have not begun to address the wider implications of expanded air travel on the climate change commitments the government has accepted.

Questions for ourselves

We do need to travel and trade, but we have freewill and the ability to choose. Some of our travel is in response to our wish to travel, not our need to do so. Can we choose to travel by a less damaging method, or less often?

Is all air freight necessary? Temperate foodstuffs grown in the third world and air-freighted here undermine the ability of the country producing them to feed its own people, and our own horticulture which could produce them.

Do we need to airfreight products with a longer shelf-life, which could go by sea? or could be produced here, as they once were?

If we make a clearer distinction between our need to travel and our wish to travel, and are more discriminating about our trade, the "need" that airport authorities and airlines perceive could disappear, and the economic case for expansion would disappear with it. As citizens we have this choice.