Aged 70, Heathrow Airport is now at bursting point

The UK’s busiest airport began operation a year after the end of the Second World War, when the British economy was shattered.

It was the beginning of a slow but relentless improvement in living standards, albeit knocked back from time to time by recessions.

Air travel has been at the heart of the improvement in living standards. Barely anyone except elite businessmen and the rich travelled by air in 1946. Now almost everyone has done and millions of British people make several air trips abroad each year.

Heathrow is now part of the fabric of British life and is viewed with widespread affection, albeit tempered by the considerable frustrations that have come from its congestion.

Ten or 20 years ago the source of frustration was the crowded and dated and depressing terminals. Now those terminals have been upgraded, and supplemented.

There has been a bewildering and gradual replacement or upgrade of Terminals 1 and 2 and 3, and the introduction of Terminals 4 and 5, so that the old Terminal 1 – the place from which travellers on the Shuttle departed for Belfast – is now closed, one day to be replaced by an extended Terminal 2.

The congestion at Heathrow is now not in the terminals but on the tarmac. The airport is running at capacity in terms of the number of flights that can use it.

This has meant that the Belfast slots are at constant risk from more valuable locations that can fill more seats.

Boris Johnson had a bold plan to close Heathrow, replace it with the quality housing that is so suited to west London, and which the capital so badly needs, and build an entirely new airport in the Thames Valley.

That magnificent plan has been rejected. In those regrettable circumstances, Heathrow will need a new runway. The government is merely delaying that inevitable day.