Sir Peter, emeritus professor at the Bartlett school at University College and a former adviser to Tory and Labour governments, will throw his weight behind the embryonic plan to construct a multi-runway international airport at Cliffe on marshland on the north Kent coast. Environmentalists may be soothed, he argues, if part of the airport is built offshore in the Thames itself.
In his first speech as president of the Town and Country Planning Association he said the government has got to take a long term - at least 50 years - view on air travel. This must mean replacing the "socially and environmentally damaging Heathrow" with a new hub where noise problems will be less and transport links better.
The TCPA has lobbied for years to redirect development in the south-east of England away from the London-Reading M4 corridor towards Essex and north Kent. As a special adviser to Tory environment secretary Michael Heseltine, Sir Peter was influential in forming ambitious schemes for development at Dartford and the Medway towns and aligning the high-speed rail link from the channel to St Pancras via London's East End.
The TCPA once put in a planning application for a new airport at Maplin Sands, also called Foulness, off the Essex coast. In a previous book Sir Peter labelled the failure to develop a new airport east of London one of the "great planning disasters". Maplin remained the officially preferred option until 1984.
Now, believing demand for access to Heathrow to be "unsustainable", Sir Peter wants to revive the idea of a coastal or estuarial airport. The idea is that the north Kent airport be partly built offshore, which might reduce conservationist objections.
In the summer, the transport secretary, Alistair Darling, published options for airport growth and included Cliffe, where a bird sanctuary would be threatened. Sir Peter tells Mr Darling to avoid getting bogged down and think as far ahead as the end of the century.
"The location of Heathrow is poor on many counts. Developing a new airport in the Thames estuary, potentially offshore, will alleviate problems of noise and allow a direct connection to the Channel tunnel rail link."
An airport at Cliffe, which is opposite Canvey Island in Essex, would be linked with a new Thames bridge near Gravesend and possibly a tunnel under the river at Benfleet.
