by Andy Beckett
The Maplin Sands are a great smooth maze of mudflats and grey-brown horizon the size of central London, gleaming dully as an old hubcap off the coast of Essex near Shoeburyness, the easternmost suburb of Southend. At low tide in the summer, parts of the sand bake hard enough in the sun for you to walk out on, and you can listen to the small noises of water trickling and poke dead jellyfish and cockle shells. In other places the quicksands go eighty feet down. Sudden North Sea fogs are also common. In February 1970, a Mr P. Arnold, a local explorer and authority on the area, noted eighty-eight people buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin on Foulness, a marshy island north of Shoeburyness, ‘whose bodies were found on the sands’.
Foulness has been farmed by a scattering of people since Saxon and possibly Roman times. In the Middle Ages sea walls were built, and the island began to be slowly extended. Maplin Sands to the east became favoured by cockle pickers. But until the mid-nineteenth century the island and the sands were best known for their great clouds of seagulls and Brent geese, Foulness meaning ‘place of birds’ in Old English. Then, in 1849, an official use was found for the area’s emptiness, when the government opened an artillery range, allowing firing from the shore onto the mudflats. Over a century later, as Heath took power, military fences, warning flags and distant booms still dominated life on Foulness and Maplin Sands. But he had other plans for the area.
During his time at the Ministry of Civil Aviation in the late forties, Heath recalls, ‘I sat on numerous committees, including one overseeing the building and development of the new airport at Heathrow. Every time I arrive at Heathrow,’ he continues, ‘I shudder to think that I was in any way, however slightly, involved in the creation of that monstrosity.’ By 1960, the noise of Heathrow was considered enough of a political problem to merit investigation by a government committee, which concluded in 1963: ‘The noise to which many people near Heathrow … are subjected is more than they can reasonably be expected to tolerate … Heathrow has proved to have been established in a much too densely populated area.’ Yet there was no question of restricting the rapid post-war growth of British civil aviation. Governments from Attlee’s onwards regarded airports as essential generators of economic growth and voters’ pleasure, so other airports had to be built near London to relieve Heathrow. The first was Gatwick, commissioned in the mid-fifties after years of planning strife, financial headaches for the government and frenetic switching between possible sites. In the early sixties, Whitehall decided that London needed a third airport, and the same painful process started again.
In January 1971, after what was then the longest and most expensive public planning inquiry in British history, the Roskill Commission recommended that the airport be built at Cublington, a village in rural Buckinghamshire. The Commission conceded that the choice would be controversial, but asserted that if Britain’s decline was to be reversed, such decisions were unavoidable: ‘The nation’s unsatisfactory economic performance in recent years can at least in part be attributed to a national tendency to forgo economic gains and to prefer other goals.’ Yet Cublington quickly proved politically impractical. The village and its soft surrounding fields and hills was the kind of corner of England – conventionally pretty, pastoral-seeming, prosperous – that could organize a ferocious campaign against the government imposition of an airport. At the same time, the Cublington campaign was able to dignify and publicize its more parochial arguments by invoking a new political philosophy: environmentalism.
Britain at the beginning of the seventies was fertile ground for green politics. For decades, conservation and animal welfare had been more popular causes there than in most comparable countries. During the sixties, such thinking began to intertwine with the back-to-the-land strand of hippy idealism. In 1966, the first British environmentalist magazine, Resurgence, was set up. In 1970 came a second, The Ecologist, edited by Edward, or ‘Teddy’, Goldsmith, the well-connected brother of the millionaire businessman James Goldsmith. In 1971, a British wing was established of the pioneering American green pressure group Friends of the Earth. In 1972, a paperback spin-off from The Ecologist called A Blueprint for Survival, which warned that ‘the industrial way of life’ was ‘not sustainable’, became a best-seller in Britain.
Westminster politicians took note. Walker invited the Blueprint authors to come and brief him, while Heath established the Department of the Environment. For the first time, green concerns, for presentational reasons at the very least, became a regular factor in government decisions. When the Roskill Commission announced its decision to concrete over Cublington, one of its members, the famous town planner Colin Buchanan, publicly dissented. An airport at Cublington, he wrote, would be an ‘environmental disaster’. Instead, the runways should be sited somewhere emptier and on the coast, where the damage would be much less. ‘I believe the mood of the country is such’, he continued, ‘that some inconvenience of accessibility to a new airport would be willingly accepted as the price for conserving the environment.’ And he had a site in mind: ‘Foulness … would be a [choice] of great significance for the future of Britain. It would show that this country, in spite of economic difficulties, is prepared to take a stand.’
Buchanan made another potent argument. An airport on the Maplin Sands (for which ‘Foulness’ was the shorthand) would, through its eastern position and transport connections, ‘assist the less prosperous eastern side of London’ – the depopulating East End, with its soupy miles of derelict river wharves and disintegrating dockyard economy. Walker and his new Department of the Environment were persuaded – in The Times he praised the ‘beautiful prose’ of Buchanan’s arguments – and Walker persuaded the Cabinet. In April 1971, the trade and industry secretary John Davies announced that the government would ignore the Roskill Commission’s painstakingly formed preference for Cublington: ‘On environmental and planning grounds the Foulness site is the best.’ The response was unambiguous. ‘For the first time in nearly thirty years,’ wrote the journalist David McKie in a book on British airports published in 1973, ‘a major decision in airport policy commanded general enthusiasm.’
The project got under way at unusual speed. In 1971, civil servants were ordered to make an immediate start on the paperwork for the airport and any transport links it needed. The following year, a special army unit, 71 Explosives Ordnance Disposal Squadron, was formed to clear decades’ worth of old artillery shells from the sands. In 1973, the Maplin Development Act was passed, creating a government-appointed Maplin Development Authority (MDA) with powers to borrow up to £250 million, ‘acquire land compulsorily for any purpose connected with its functions’ and pay compensation to ‘any person [who] … derived the whole or part of his means of livelihood from the taking of fish or shellfish or the gathering of white weed’ on the sands.
That same year, the first construction work started. In the spring, when the North Sea storms were at their most testing, 155,000 cubic metres of gravel were deposited on the sands almost three miles from shore and piled up using pumps and bulldozers into a long, concave, artificial island, like the fuselage of some enormous passenger aircraft rising up from the shallows. This ‘trial bank’, 300 metres by 30 at high tide, was a tiny fragment of the planned airport, built at the same angle to the shore and intended to test if the complex could be protected by gravel-based, relatively economical sea walls. In April 1974, an MDA report on the trial bank’s condition after a year found that it had been ‘exposed to very severe conditions … with a large number of southerly gales and waves up to one and a half metres high’, but that the damage had been minor. The MDA’s logo, appropriately it seemed, was of a muscular letter ‘M’ standing impregnably above bobbing waves.
The confidence that Maplin could be built had several sources. There was the long history of land reclamation at Foulness; there was the fact that the Dutch had already constructed an offshore airport, Schipol, in similar North Sea conditions; and then there were the private plans for airports off Foulness that had
been piling up for decades. The first scheme had been in the thirties. Another had been drawn up in the fifties. In the sixties, a consortium including major construction companies got as far as unveiling a model airport the size of several tennis courts, complete with simulated tides and winking miniature runway lights.
In a crowded coastal country like Britain, it was perhaps not surprising that people should dream of expanding their island a little. But with Maplin there were also more abstract and political preoccupations at work. Britain’s airports and airlines, disproportionately large for a middle-ranking European country, were a legacy of the empire and its need for a far-flung transport network and one of the dwindling number of areas of economic activity where Britain remained a world power. Yet, by the early seventies, there was a growing fear that in civil aviation Holland and France, which was also rapidly expanding its airport capacity, would catch up. ‘Maplin is necessary to maintain Britain’s position as one of the world’s great centres of international aviation,’ Walker’s successor as environment secretary, Geoffrey Rippon, told the Commons in early 1973.
Heath himself, with his deep-seated dislike of Heathrow and his belief in government planning to get the economy moving, was excited by Maplin. Later the same year, he told a meeting of Conservative MPs, ‘As a nation, we should not falter in major projects which other countries take in their stride.’ The airport scheme was also a literal manifestation of his desire to move Britain closer to the rest of Europe. In 1972, the year he signed the treaty marking Britain’s entry into the Common Market, an outline of how Essex would be extended eastwards to accommodate the airport was produced.
I looked at the drawings on a sweltering May afternoon in the House of Lords record office thirty-two years later. A young woman in a sundress fetched the huge rolled-up sheets of paper with a slight air of puzzlement at my interest. Unrolled, they seemed pristine enough to have barely ever been touched. Across empty expanses of white representing the North Sea, bold lines were flung out to form a new lozenge-shaped peninsula, eight miles long and three miles wide. Part of one side was shielded by the eastern edge of Foulness; the rest was surrounded by water. A sea wall around the airport was indicated, with a height of between forty and fifty feet. Two runways were also marked, positioned so that the planes, as in many of the world’s more shrewdly sited airports, came in to land over the sea and not over the roofs of Southend to the west.
These plans, however, were just a cautious early draft of the ambitions for Maplin. Once the first runway was completed, which it was initially anticipated would be in 1975 or 1976, and the second became operational, anticipated in 1980, work would begin on a further two runways, giving the airport twice as many as Heathrow. In addition, the Maplin complex would contain a new seaport that would receive container ships and supertankers. With oil being so cheap and very much in demand in the early seventies, it was believed the latter would soon be too big to sail up the Thames Estuary towards London. The seaport would replace the capital’s dying docks and rival the much more modern Dutch port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest.
And then there would be a Maplin New Town. ‘Maplin will create a need for large-scale urban development … built to the highest environmental standards,’ announced the junior environment minister Eldon Griffiths in 1972. The following year, his department predicted that the New Town – or ‘a brand new jet city’, as it was sometimes more excitedly referred to in the Commons – would have an eventual population of over 300,000. This new settlement would extend from the airport and seaport in the east, across the flat windswept vastness of Foulness and its neighbouring islands and tidal creeks to Southend and the hills beyond, half a dozen miles to the west. The building work would continue ‘to the turn of the century and beyond’. New industrial estates would serve the conurbation, and additional expansion out into the North Sea was anticipated. ‘Further reclamation’, said Griffiths in 1972, ‘will be undertaken when needed.’
To link it all to London and the rest of Britain there would be a new eight-lane motorway and high-speed railway, racing through the towns, villages and marshes of south-east Essex. There was talk – and with Maplin it was sometimes difficult to separate the plans from hopes and rumours – of ‘an Advanced Passenger Train system’ carrying people at 125 miles per hour non-stop from the airport to a new station between King’s Cross and St Pancras in central London; or of the same twenty-minute journey time being achieved by the use of passenger-carrying ‘tracked hovercraft’. Around King’s Cross, one of London’s tattiest railway quarters, property speculators bought up streets of buildings in anticipation.
In Essex, the reaction to Maplin was more ambivalent. Southend was a place in a slight limbo in the early seventies. It was a British seaside resort in a dawning era of cheap flights to Spain – a problem that building Maplin was not going to diminish. And it was a potentially well-positioned dormitory town – but before mass commuting from Essex to London had really started. Local unemployment was notably high, even at a time when the national rate was rising rapidly. In 1973, the British Airports Authority predicted that building Maplin would create over 16,000 long-term construction jobs, ‘approaching’ 70,000 positions serving the airport and seaport, and over 15,000 additional vacancies in the enlarged Essex economy. People began moving to Southend to wait for them.
The borough council strongly supported Maplin. So did the local trade unions. In 1973, a Maplin Movement was formed which would claim ‘several thousand’ members. Yet others felt differently about living next door to what Rippon liked to call ‘the world’s first environmental airport’. The most prominent were the Defenders of Essex.
In Southend, people still nod knowingly when you mention them. The Defenders were strongest in Shoeburyness and the other parts of town closest to the Maplin site, but they had support from all over the county and from all three Southend MPs. The Defenders’ campaigning was a mixture of church-hall politeness – coffee mornings, piano concerts, raffles – and something more abrasive and modern – mass rallies, lurid yellow posters of ‘Jackboots Over Essex’, a car convoy to London to dramatize the extra road traffic Maplin would generate. Local and national journalists loved the Defenders; Friends of the Earth, damagingly for the airport’s green credentials, backed them too. One of the Defenders’ most fruitful issues was the proposed demolition of properties that stood in the way of the Maplin motorway. When the government distributed a questionnaire to Essex libraries asking the public which of six nervously circuitous motorway routes they preferred, the libraries ran out of copies in twenty-four hours.
Other local objections to Maplin made equally good news stories. Foulness islanders claimed that noise carried unusually far across the sands: a conversation between two yachtsmen was said to have been overheard half a mile away. The quicksands would destroy the runways: they were said to have swallowed a ship carrying timber in a matter of minutes. In Leigh-on-Sea, a picturesque old part of Southend whose cocklers made a living from the sands, the Shellfish Merchants Association claimed that the national balance of payments would be damaged by cockle imports if Maplin was built. And then there were the Brent geese. A fifth of the world’s population spent their winter on the sands. The birds were large and dark-bellied and hard to see in dim light; they might be sucked into jet engines over Maplin, with catastrophic results for all concerned. The possibility was exhaustively debated all the way to the House of Commons.
But for all the colour of the Essex protesters, they did not seem to be gathering decisive momentum. The minutes of a meeting of Southend anti-Maplin protesters in March 1973 note in exasperation that even ‘At Shoebury … the apathy of people was appalling … Young people had accepted the government’s assurances and adopted the attitude that if the airport comes, we can move. The old … took the view that they would be dead before the airport was built.’
It was in the Commons that the scheme began to encounter more formidable opposition. Crosland, now shadow environment secretar
y, was an eloquent and relentless critic. Maplin was a ‘thoroughly bad site’ for an airport, he argued in a debate in February 1973; rather than reviving east London, it would draw people and jobs away; and, above all, it was a reckless extravagance: ‘We have … much experience now of the constantly escalating cost of these grandiose projects.’ Labour’s scepticism was shared by some Conservative MPs – not just the traditional foes of development in rural areas, but also a new kind of Tory.
Norman Tebbit was one. He was from a working-class background and represented one of the upwardly mobile working-class constituencies on the London–Essex borders – first Epping, then Chingford – that had recently acquired political significance. He was unashamedly right-wing and abrasive in his manner. In the debate on Maplin in February 1973, despite having been an MP for less than three years, he was openly contemptuous of his party’s flagship infrastructure project. ‘This will be the most expensive airport ever built,’ he said, his prediction given credibility by the fact that he had been an airline pilot before becoming an MP. He went on to compare Maplin to one of post-war Britain’s most disastrous government economic initiatives, the Attlee administration’s abortive scheme to solve a shortage of cooking oil by growing peanuts in Tanganyika.
In Tebbit and Crosland’s attacks on Maplin, the beginnings of broader misgivings about the high level of British state spending since the Second World War could be heard. In early 1973, the rising right-wing economist Alan Walters, who had been expressing doubts about the post-war consensus for years, turned his attention to the airport project in a letter to The Times. Building Maplin, he suggested, might contribute to Britain’s worsening rate of inflation. By June 1973, when the airport was debated in the Commons again, additional worries had crystallized. It was noted that none of the airlines were keen on the site and might have to be compelled by the government to use it. The Labour MP Tam Dalyell, often full of foreboding but far-sighted with it, also raised the possibility that Maplin might be made redundant by future problems with the global supply of jet fuel. The government won the debate by only nine votes.