The British Airports Authority (since privatised as BAA) was very keen. "If Maplin is not developed," said its chairman, Nigel Foulkes, "hideous alternatives will be faced." But the scheme was dead within a year. The cost escalated, as costs of large developments tend to. There were worries about the geese that spent each winter in the misty local creeks and shallows: they might collide with the aircraft. There were cannily overstated protests against "the rape of Essex" from homeowners around Southend, the one substantial town near Maplin. Yet the thing that really did for the airport was less expected. During 1974, air travel shrank. The oil crisis suddenly made it more expensive. Package tour firms went bust. That summer, to wide agreement, it was announced that the country no longer required a new airport.
Since then, passenger numbers over the south-east of England have roughly quadrupled. Between now and 2020, they are expected to at least double again. To describe this increase, BAA currently favours the word "relentless"; the government goes for "exceptionally rapid"; environmentalists prefer to talk about dozens of new airports. The fifth terminal for Heathrow alone, the construction of which is expected to begin next year, is anticipating as many customers as all of London's airports put together during the Maplin era.
Britain, you could say, is conducting an experiment. Nowhere in the world shares our concentration of air traffic. Nowhere in the world has as many anti-airport protesters: on its own, the Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise (Hacan) claims 25,000 members. And nowhere, in recent years, has the combination of new budget airlines and economic good times, restless businessmen and rising family incomes, had quite such an ambiguous impact.
British air terminals are so bursting that the present chief executive of BAA, Mike Hodgkinson, describes his business as "giving the customers the best possible experience under the circumstances". Delays this summer are expected to be the worst since the Association of European Airlines began keeping count, with the exception of 1999, when there was a full-scale aerial war over the Balkans. Near misses between planes, according to air traffic controllers supervising Heathrow, are becoming frighteningly frequent.
Meanwhile, beyond their endless perimeter fences, Britain's airports are spreading other sorts of trouble. "Emissions from aircraft are a growing contributor to climate change," admits a recent government consultation paper on the future of British aviation. At the same time, the paper goes on, "The effect of emissions from aircraft... is less than that of road traffic to and from airports." And then there is the noise question. As the number of flights has grown, so has the number and size of "holding patterns", in effect airborne traffic jams. They have long blighted parts of west London: Heathrow, almost uniquely for a large airport, is sited so that aircraft come in to land over residential streets. But these days the rumble and shriek of descending and circling jets has spread to the south, east and north-west of the capital. Doing an outside broadcast for television anywhere in London is becoming difficult. More seriously, an investigation by the University of London concluded last month that interruptions from aircraft flying over classrooms "may well present a threat to children's reading".
The expansion of British air travel, in short, is a modern paradox. It feels increasingly unacceptable, and increasingly unavoidable. It is a consumer treat, yet its consequences, for once, cannot be exported to less prosperous countries. It is an appetite that feeds and frustrates itself: the more planes drone overhead, the more people want to fly abroad to escape the sense of claustrophobia, and the more abroad grows as noisy as home. And all this has created a situation where it is in everybody's interests to shout "crisis".
David Franklin is living out his retirement next to four lanes of speeding traffic in south-east London. From his solid, partly double-glazed house, you can also hear trains rattling past nearby, police sirens in the distance, and the churning and hammering of a building site across the road. But it is the planes that bother him: "Between a quarter to five and 10 to five this morning," he begins, "we've had three of them. Between five and 10 past, we've had three more... "
Franklin has been here for 18 years. Until 1998 it was quiet enough, at the back of the house at least, for him to hold chamber music concerts. Then he gradually became aware that the occasional plane overhead was blurring into something more continuous and intrusive. A holding pattern had been established above his conservatory. "You hear them manoeuvring," he says, as we sit with all the windows closed on a stifling morning. He cocks his head slightly. "Here we go. That sounds like one with four engines." Through the glass comes a reverberation, then a tearing sound, then a high-pitched, hissing deceleration, like an immense bus slowing down. "It can take two minutes," says Franklin, who is the chairman of the recently established local branch of Hacan, "from when you first hear a plane coming to when you hear it going." He listens for a moment, sitting neatly on his sofa, quite still with suppressed outrage. The jumbo finally fades. A low thundering immediately starts on the other side of the sky.
No such noises disturb Mike Hodgkinson. In his office at BAA headquarters in central London, the only planes in evidence are silent, spotless models taking off from the tops of his cupboards. He does not work, or live, under any major flight paths; nor, it appears at first, does he ever worry that the current surge in air travel might be out of control. In fact, quite the contrary: "Demand has not been satisfied," he says, smiling. "Capacity needs to increase." He reaches for his current favourite argument. "People have seen the consequences of no investment on the railways and the tube. If terminal five doesn't happen, London becomes a third-rate city."
Before he started at "the world's leading airport company", Hodgkinson used to work in the car industry. He earned £681,000 last year, up from £397,000 the year before. He does not have the air of a man much troubled by the environmental consequences of prosperity.
Yet he and his employer, in recent years, have realised the political and commercial value of a well-publicised corporate conscience. Press releases from BAA come heavily trimmed with green - even a diagram of proposed extensions to Stansted airport has a pastoral tint, as if the company was planning allotments rather than steel and tarmac. When Hodgkinson is not arguing for bigger and busier airports, he talks vaguely but at length about "sustainability". His language turns soft and consensual, and his manner - he has the trace of an Essex accent - seems matter-of-fact and quite humble for a chief executive of a multinational. But when you ask him how, for example, terminal five, the biggest construction ever suggested for a green belt site, is compatible with "sustainable growth", his tact and fluency evaporates. It is the same with the noise question: "People are more vocal locally," says Hodgkinson, as if he blames them for it. "People are prepared to put up with less."
In Japan, there is an airport at Narita, near Tokyo, that has taken more than 30 years to finish. Protesters have thrown petrol bombs, fought riot police, released balloons into flight paths, and built towers to obstruct landing aircraft. Nothing so confrontational has yet occurred in Britain, but Franklin thinks it might. "It is going to be harder to stop people taking direct action, if all the letter-writing in the world has got us nowhere." He pauses while another plane passes overhead. "There was a lady who recently blocked the road tunnel at Heathrow by driving at five miles an hour. She wasn't officially supported by Hacan, but a lot of people approved."
Flying is a less universal experience than its advocates like to suggest. Last year, according to preliminary research recently conducted for the government, barely a third of Britons flew away on holiday. Those who use airports are predominantly drawn from the wealthier classes. Nina Bevan, who is not, has lived in the same semi in Hounslow since 1937. Heathrow was just a nearby village and a common then. Now jets seem about to land in her teacups. "None of my friends will sit out here with me," she says, as we try to hold a conversation in garden chairs placed three feet from each other. Does she use the airport? "I've never flown."
Over the next few decades, nevertheless, British airports are almost certainly going to get much bigger and more numerous. The government shares BAA's enthusiasm for growth, on the grounds that flying brings major "economic benefits". This is debatable: aviation is only the 26th biggest British industry, is heavily subsidised - there is no tax on aircraft fuel - and does unquantifiable damage to the economy by, for example, keeping people awake at night. Like support for other officially prestigious businesses such as arms manufacture, maintaining the country's status as the world centre of air travel may have more to do with symbolism - forming a bridge between America and Europe, holding on to the old empire routes - than usefulness.
Yet even Friends of the Earth says growth cannot be stopped, only slowed. Runway schemes once abandoned for their contentiousness may have to be dusted off. Maplin Sands still has its supporters, among them a surprising number of environmentalists and Sir Terence Conran, the designer, restaurateur and setter of consumer trends, who writes letters to newspapers suggesting it as an alternative to BAA's cramped terminals.
If you go there, there is still a temptingly wide horizon for pilots. On the nearby shore, there are not many houses to blight compared to Heathrow. Even on a hot, hazy afternoon, only a few pensioners in deck chairs and four lads with a football are sharing the beach. The manager of the beach shop is already pulling down his shutters at half past three.
He says you can spot an early piece of Maplin airport a few miles out to sea on a clearer day. He squints at the horizon. "Seabirds live on it." Not, perhaps, for much longer.
