J.G. Ballard: Airports - Observer article

Going somewhere?

AIRPORTS
By J.G. Ballard

[The Observer 14/9/97]

Airports and airfields have always held a special magic, gateways to the infinite possibilities that only the sky can offer. In 1946, when I first came to England, a dark and derelict shell of a country, I used to dream of the runways of Wake Island and Midway, stepping stones that would carry me back across the Pacific to the China of my childhood. At school in Cambridge, and later as a medical student at King's college, I would flee all that fossilised Gothic self-immersion and ride a borrowed motorcycle to the American airbases at Mildenhall and Lakenheath, happy to stare through the wire at the lines of silver bombers and transport planes. Airports then were places where America arrived to greet us, where the world of tomorrow touched down in Europe.

Sadly, Britain faltered on the way to its own future, half-heartedly erecting a shabby urban limbo of under-serviced municipal towers and wind-swept shopping precincts. Together they provided the nostalgia- worshippers with all the ammunition needed to launch their postmodernist counter-attack. The pitched roof seemed to rule the Eighties, a vernacular dialect unable to distinguish a town hall from a supermarket or fire station, too many temples to tweeness that resemble offerings on the altar of Prince Charles's uneasy conscience.

Airports, thankfully. are designed around the needs of their collaborating technologies, and seem to be almost the only form of public architecture free from the pressures of kitsch and nostalgia. As far as I know, there are no half-timbered terminal buildings or pebble- dashed control towers.

For the past 35 years I have lived in the Thames Valley town of Shepperton, a suburb not of London but of London Airport. The catchment area of Heathrow extends for at least 10 miles to its south and west, a zone of motorway intersections, dual carriageways, science parks, marinas and industrial estates, watched by police CCTV speed-check cameras, a landscape which most people affect to loathe but which I regard as the most advanced and admirable in the British Isles, and paradigm of the best that the future offers us.

I welcome its transience, alienation and discontinuities, and its unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposibility and the instant impulse. Here, under the flight paths of Heathrow, everything is designed for the next five minutes. Its centrepiece, and for me the most inspiring in England today, is Michael Manser's superb Heathrow Hilton, near Terminal Four. Its vast atrium resembles a planetarium in the way that it salutes the skies above its roof.

By comparison with London Airport, London itself seems hopelessly antiquated. Its hundreds of miles of gentrified stucco are an aching hangover from the nineteenth century that should have been bulldozed decades ago. London may well be the only world capital - with the possible exception of Moscow - that has gone from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first without experiencing all the possibilities and excitements of the twentieth in any meaningful way. Visiting London, I always have the sense of a city devised as an instrument of political control, like the class system that preserves England from revolution. The labyrinth of districts and boroughs, the endless columned porticos that once guarded the modest terraced cottages of Victorian clerks, together make clear that London is a place where everyone knows his place.

By contrast, at an airport such as Heathrow the individual is defined, not by the tangible ground mortgaged into his soul for the next 40 years, but the indeterminate flicker of flight numbers trembling on an annunciator screen. We are no longer citizens with civic obligations, but passengers for whom all destinations are theoretically open, our lightness of baggage mandated by the system. Airports have become a new kind of discontinuous city, whose vast populations, measured by annual passenger throughputs, are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy. An easy camaraderie rules the departure lounges, along with the virtual abolition of nationality - whether we are Scots or Japanese is far less important than where we are going. I've long suspected that people are only truly happy and aware of a real purpose to their lives when they hand over their tickets at the check-in.

Above all, airports are places of good news. I miss the days when celebrities were photographed as they stepped through airliner doors. The headiest ozone of glamour and optimism crossed the Atlantic in the Constellations and Stratocruisers of the Fifties as Hollywood stars, Presidents and tycoons waved from the steps, bringing their confidence and likeability to this northern European corner of the depressed world.

I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the next century. The great airports are already suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centripetal city whose population forever circles its notional centre, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart. A mastery of the discontinuities of metropolitan life has always been essential to the successful urban dweller - we live in a street where we know none of our neighbours, and our close friends live equally isolated lives within 50 square miles around us. We work in a district five miles away, shop in another and see films and plays in a third. A failure to master these discontinuities, whether social or genetic in origin, leaves some ethnic groups at a disadvantage, forced into enclaves that seem to reconstitute mental maps of ancestral villages.

But the modern airport defuses these tensions, and offers its passengers the pleasures and social reassurance of the boarding lounge. Its instantly summoned village life span is long enough to calm us, and short enough not to be a burden. The concourses are the ramblas and agoras of the future city, time-freeze zones where all the clocks of the world are displayed, an atlas of arrivals and destinations forever updating itself, where briefly we become true world citizens. Air travel may well be the most important civic duty that we discharge today, erasing class and national distinctions and subsuming them within the unitary global culture of the departure lounge.

In addition to the airport itself, I value the benevolent social and architectural influence that a huge transit facility such as Heathrow casts on the urban landscape around it. I have learnt to like the intricate network of perimeter roads, the car-rental offices, air freight depots and travel clinics, the light industrial and motel architecture that unvaryingly surrounds every major airport in the world.

Together they constitute the reality of our lives, rather than some mythical domain of village greens, cathedral closes and manorial vistas. Much as I admire, say, Syon House, now home to a huge garden centre and a venue for business entertaining, I feel more at home driving through an office park like the New Square complex at Bedfont, its hi-tech corporate hangars only a javelin's throw from the Heathrow perimeter road, and surely influenced by the proximity of all those 747 tailplanes that cruise the tarmac like the fins of amiable sharks. Even the old terminal buildings - One, Two and Three - have a certain period charm. Together, they and the main control tower represent the last survival of the Festival of Britain. I look forward to their replacement in due course, and to terminal Five, and beyond that to terminals Six and Seven, and the transformation of Britain into the ultimate departure lounge. After all, we have every reason to leave.

This article first appeared in September's Blueprint magazine and is included in the book 'Airport', published to coincide with the exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery, 5 Great Newport Street, London WC2

[This article originally appeared on the webpage www.terminal1.demon.co.uk/JGBallard.htm which has been subsequently deleted]