Joined-up air travel
Last month I saved Patrick, a rugby-loving bar owner in a village I know in France, from a minor disaster. He had bought flights to see France play Scotland at Murrayfield next weekend, which involved arriving at London Luton and then flying from London Gatwick to Edinburgh 90 minutes later. Lulled by the word “London” in their names, he had no idea that they are 100km apart.
Which leads to a suggestion on how to use the £15bn or so that may not be spent on Heathrow’s third runway: build a 400kph magnetic levitation train, along the lines of the one that connects Shanghai to its airport, from Heathrow to Gatwick, such that passengers can change flights in little more time than it takes to get from one terminal to another. It could be arranged so that you could avoid going through immigration control.
The main argument for expanding Heathrow is that bigger is better: the more flights there are, the more opportunities for making connections, the more attractive it becomes to airlines. My plan, which I offer for no fee, would make a gigantic super-airport, Gatrow or Heathwick. In due course Stansted, Luton and City airports could be connected too. Heathwickstantonity. Bit of a mouthful. In lieu of the aforementioned fee, perhaps it could be called Mooreport.
Upcycling’s the answer
On the other hand, a visit to Abbey Wood station makes me wonder if any project involving trains and tunnels should ever be attempted in Britain again. Here, on the eastern end of the Elizabeth line, aka Crossrail, a brand-new train stands on a platform served by brand-new but for now inactive escalators, complete with a destination indicator announcing that trains to Heathrow and Paddington are “On time”. They’re not. They’re several years late.
To express any doubt about infrastructure projects is to provoke frothing and foaming about us lacking the vision of our Victorian forbears. This might be right: there’s now a reluctance to make tens of thousands homeless, in the way that the 1860s builders of the Midlands Railway to St Pancras did. So perhaps Britain should choose to lead the world in something else, what you might call make-do-and-mend engineering. Like the London Overground, which with judicious re-use of existing viaducts, and the application of the colour orange on the tube map, has already transformed large parts of London.
Seoul searching
The Abbey Wood station, being a real thing serving a phantom purpose, is an inversion of the spectacular modern house in Parasite. From the profound depths of its basement to its celestial glass-walled living zone, it is one of the unforgettable houses in cinema, up there with Mrs Bates’ home in Psycho. Having been on an architectural visit to Seoul a few years ago, I wondered how I had not heard of it. Felt I was falling down on the job, even. So I was relieved to learn that it doesn’t really exist, or rather it was made through the magic of editing out of four different sets. So it is a phantom serving a successfully completed purpose – the making of a great film.
A whiff of fear
Speaking of basements, a story from Herb Greene, the 90-year-old US architect I interviewed for this week’s New Review. It concerns the astonishing house he built for himself and his family on the Oklahoma prairies in 1961. Coming originally from the east coast, and nervous about tornadoes, he had a shelter built. Then, there was a scare about impending nuclear attack, so he went down to the shelter. Only to find that it had been colonised by a skunk. So he decided to take his chances with the nukes.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
