Overheard: Schiphol airport, Irish flights

I left Schiphol Airport this week, flying to Cork. There were long queues for each part of the journey, where I over-heard Irish voices saying:

• This Guinness shortage is just marketing. Or PR cos they're not paying for it. Guinness and Ryanair - there are some marketing geniuses in Dublin!
  
  
• Get ready to whip out that OV Chip Card!
  
  
• Did your brother marry somewhere fancy?
  
  
• They're just ugly and weird like, the bullies
  
  
• She's from Spain, she's fierce nocturnal. We'd be getting up for the airport at 3am and she'd be making her dinner.
  
  
• Did you see on his Instagram, the alpaca? Why didn't we do that?

Heathrow Hinterland

I went recently on another Royal Geographical Society Discovering Britain walk.

This walk explored what it's like to live in the shadow of Heathrow airport.

Beforehand, I had expected to walk to take me through rather bland, boring mid 20th-century housing estates and lots of them.

Instead the walk went through two historic villages and lots of park and woodland.

Some things stood out...

There was a near constant smell of autumnal smog, like lots of log fires burning.

It was quite confusing and disconcerting. Was I actually smelling domestic woodfires (which, though polluting, have a comforting quality) or is the smell from the constantly soaring planes, the roaring traffic and the area's industry?

The planes are loud, but in some places the constant whirr from M4 motorway traffic is even louder.

The walk took in the previously proposed site of Heathrow's third runway, now a large field. I had rather glibly not paid very much attention to this debate at the time, but being there seeing the site put everything in perspective.

The walk was fascinating, an exploration of an area which I'd never considered before. I'll definitely be looking more closely out of the window the next time I fly from Heathrow.

Air-port

A new airport terminal in Marseille was in the news last week, as it is being dubbed Europe's first no-frills airport. The former freight warehouse has been minimally transformed into an airport, designed to cater for the burgeoning low-cost airline market. This article describes the airport - only minimal seating, very few mechanics with passengers carrying their own luggage to security, there are no carpets and passengers walk to the plane, rather than on ramps. The idea is that the airport cuts down on costs and time spent waiting.

I can't quite decide if this is a good idea or not. Cutting time and costs is to be commended, but it should be questioned what is being lost. Airports are strange spaces, devoid of any identification. One airport wall could almost be any another. If it were not for the shops, restaurants and other amenities, airports could be in any city, any country, anywhere.

I remember quite a few years ago, Cork airport unveiled a statue of the ex-Irish soccer manager Jack Charlton. This statue was located in the main hall of the airport. The statue is gone now, as is the sense of the space as being Irish. The new terminal is a very bland space - the most Irish aspect is its use of wood as a decorative material (an almost ubiquitous feature of contemporary Irish industrial architecture). In the run up to the launch of the airport's new terminal, Cork airport ran an ad campaign saying "Soon, you won't know where you are" referring to the great changes in the airport, but equally having a poignant double meaning.


San Francisco airport was the probably worst airport that I've been in. Nothing about it said "San Francisco". I arrived in the evening, the airport was relatively quiet. But more than that, it was dull. All I remember from the airport is grey - grey walls, grey carpets, grey atmosphere.

I quite like airports. I like knowing where I am. I'm always keen to find the large signs outside airports declaring the town or city, and disappointed when they're not there. I feel sad that airports are not more rooted in their cities. Maybe I'm overly sentimental, of course, as airports in the modern travel industry seem to have become nothing more than in-between spaces, out-of-place buffer zones.