A Circular Airport. An Airport Above The River.
In 1929 London Heathrow Airport was known as the Great West Aerodrome, a small airfield built on farmland southeast of Heathrow hamlet.
Two years later, in 1931, British architect Charles Glover proposed creating an elevated airport above the railway sidings at Kings Cross station. Located close to central London, Kings Cross serves as one of the busiest railway stations in the country.
Designed in the shape of a pinwheel, Glovers plan called for an elevated network of taxiways and runways built over aircraft hangars and terminal buildings.
At the time, London had no skyscrapers like it has today, and planes would have been able to land and take off in any direction.
Glover planned a 800m-long concrete runway. The airport would be used for commercial and private flights and have all its facilities in specially built buildings below the airport.
Passengers would be taken to the gates via elevators. There would also be massive lifts similar to today's aircraft carriers that could transport aircraft from the hangars to the surface. Because of the airport's circular design, aircraft could takeoff and land in eight directions.
While sounding good in theory, there were problems with the design that would hamper the airport at a later date. Firstly the runways would never be able to be lengthened, and should an aircraft overshoot the runway, the consequences would have been a major disaster both for the people on the plane and those on the ground. After initial excitement, the proposal went nowhere.
London may have had its very own city center airport situated on a platform over the River Thames at Westminster if this wacky idea had come to fruition. The illustration above appeared in Popular Science magazine back in 1934. The local authority even considered buying up land on the south bank of the River Thames between Tower and London Bridge and use it to build a new airport.
This, too, never came to fruition, and it was only when the London City Airport opened in 1987 that the capital's center got its first usable airport.
