Dan Snow's History Hit - A Short History of The Airport

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

It’s where our ancient instincts to travel, to trade, to reunite with family and explore meet modern technology and innovation. From muddy airfields to gleaming cathedrals of designer shopping, fancy restaurants and even botanical gardens- the airport has become this weird and wonderful place that tells the story of the modern world. For the 80th birthday of Heathrow - one of the world’s pioneering and most connected airports - Dan explores the curious history of the airport from the earliest versions back in the 1920s, through the luxurious golden age of travel to the revolution of the jet age and beyond. To find out more, head to heathrow.com/80 Thanks to Alastair Gordon, author of ‘Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure’, as well as Alan Smilie, Ady Dolan, Zulfikar and Joseph Gregory at Heathrow.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history.com slash subscribe. At the time, it wasn't even. Even Heathrow. It was London Airport. And back then it was just a collection of army tents, prefab huts in a field. It was often so muddy they had to walk on wooden duckboards laid across the ground. But even still, it felt different to the airfields that so many had experienced during the war. It was a new airport. It had floral patterned armchairs for a start, and sofas for travelers to rest on,

There were tables with fresh flowers to create a pleasant ambiance while they waited to board. It was rudimentary, yes, but those very first passengers must have felt like they were on the cusp of the future. These newfangled flying machines, once the reserve of aristocrats and military men, were now being made accessible for regular people. And by doing so, they would change everything. The world must still have felt so big, so exotic, and yet now it felt reachable like never before. The very first flight out of London airport was in a converted Lancaster bomber, starlight, they called it, flying to Buenos Aires. The journey would take over 35 hours, stopping several times to refuel.

And today, in just 80 years of staggering momentum. That airport now operates around 1,400 flights every day, with a plane taking off or landing every 45 seconds. We're so used to rushing through the airport, trying to make the flight, looking for the gate, doing a bit of last-minute shopping, I don't think we really stop and think about just how central these places are

in the modern story of us, of humans. humanity. And it's also a place where our greatest technological achievements meet and facilitate our oldest human instincts to explore, to trade, to consume, to migrate, to reunite with loved ones, and to get to that bigger world beyond our horizons. I'm just walking now into the giant terminal at Heathrow Airport, which celebrates its 80th birthday this year. I'm a trace the story of this place from its beginnings as a prefab and a farmer's field to this giant cathedral what I'm standing in now, this place of commerce and glass and steel, this entry and exit point. He throws one of the great pioneers in the story of air travel. It's here that we can

explore how we got to where we are today, where controllers in towering glass buildings figure out how to orchestrate thousands of enormous aircraft landing and taking off every day with astonishing precision and in safety. We can think about how air travel revolutionise global trade. And also here is that I want to explore this key question of who on earth buys luggage after they've passed through security? What's that about? So folks, close those overheads. Check out where the emergency exits are and do your seatbelts.

Sit back and relax. You listen to Dan Snow's history. And this is a short history of the airport. They call it Heathrow locally. A few years back, it was seven square miles of quiet Middlesex countryside. It was in April 1944 that history came to these country fields. Thus, in under two years, British engineers had built and were operating one of the largest civil aerodromes in the world.

I'm walking through the departures lounge now, surround on all sides by shops. flashing lights. It's an enticing space. And I cannot tell you the amount of times I have run through this place at top speed

because I'm about to miss a flight. I've been here either dragging my kids or trying to catch up with my long-suffering producer Marion de Forge of this podcast who is on time and presents itself at the gate

with passport, boarding pass and two-liter bottle of water. I am a sweating, heavily breathing mess by the time I get to the gates. Because I get distracted in this vast emporium through which I'm now walking. There's my favourite sushi place where I drag the team when we've been on the way to Peru or China. And this is the bit where you've done the admin, you've checked in your bags, you've got that all-important boarding pass in your pocket on your phone,

and you can just kick back and relax, wait for that flight to take off. This is where the anticipation builds for the work trip. for the holiday, the vacation. This is where it all happens. There's a sense of magic here on this concourse. All the excitement that our forebears would have felt standing on the wolves as the tall ships cast off their ropes

and they sailed off to a place over the horizon. All that excitement is what we feel right here. This is our portal to the rest of the world. And we've been imagining and designing these spaces ever since air travel was pioneered when that great seemingly unsolvable challenge of heavier than air-powered flight was suddenly solved. It was 1903 when two bicycle mechanics from Ohio managed to coax a fragile machine of wood and muslin into the air for around 12 seconds at Kitty Hawk. Their names were Orville and Wilbur Wright.

This prototype aircraft barely travelled 120 feet. It actually crashed later that day when Augusta Wind picked it up and rolled it over onto the ground. It was so damaged it never flew again. But that first flight did prove something revolutionary. That a powered aircraft could take off. It could be controlled in flight and land safely. The age of heavier than air, aviates. had begun. Progress was astonishingly fast. Inventors and engineers across Europe and America

raced to build bigger and faster and more reliable aircraft. And what began as experimental flying machines quickly became practical tools. Aircraft evolved from curious novelties at public demonstrations into something with military potential. It wasn't long before humans did what they so often do with new technology and adapt it for warfare. Soon those planes were carrying bombs and they were taking aerial photographs of each other's movements and there was even dueling, fighting going on in the skies. And terrible as that bloody conflict was, it did accelerate the development of aviation faster than would have been the case in peacetime. By 1918, planes could fly higher, faster, further, more reliably than anyone had imagined a decade earlier.

And when peace did return governments and entrepreneurs began to wonder, If aircraft could carry bombs and people across vast spaces, well, why not passengers, post, and cargo? As the 1920s arrived, so too did the age of commercial air travel. This is Alastair Gordon. He's a cultural historian. He's author of Naked Airport, a cultural history of the world's most revolutionary structure. And he's talking to me about the earliest iterations of the airport. In terms of, you know, a modern airport, I think that moment when Charles Lindberg, May of 1927, you know, made it across the Atlantic, landed in the middle of the night at Bourget in Paris. And it seemed that moment of this heroic challenge that Lindberg, you know, managed to succeed at

and then coming into Paris. And he couldn't believe how big the airport was at Bourget. You know, he thought it was a huge factory. Because there was nothing like it in the U.S. when he took off from Long Island, you know, was just a field, you know, with a hanger at one end. And then he came back and basically preached this doctrine of without airports, European countries have these nationally financed, you know, incredible railroad type station airports that were so far behind. So he literally flew around the country from town to town preaching this new gospel of how aviation was going to create a new economy in the United States. And that's really a fascinating moment to me.

I didn't realize. So airports were designed to actually give a sense of security and officialdom to passengers. I just assumed they sprang up because that's the nature of entrepreneur. But you think actually the majesty of the surroundings is meant to make people calm down and be a little less nervous about their flight. Well, certainly with Henry Ford, I mean, that's the way he thought. Most people who flew either had to fly because they were like businessmen on deadlines when they had to beat out the other guy, you know, by like a day who was taking the train, something like that. But often you'd sit on a pile of mailbags in the back of the plane.

And in those early airports that you study, do you start to see the patterns, the bone structure of the modern airport that we still recognize today? Are there checking desks and waiting areas and stores? It's so tied in with the war, the two major world wars, right, of the 20th century, because after World War I, you had these first bombers that could be converted into passenger use. And then they realized, especially in Europe, they realized that there was this lucrative potential in all that. Both in Europe and America, there was a tendency to use the conventional railroad station as a model that kind of made sense, although airplanes don't run on tracks.

But a lot of the early utopian conceptual ideas for these things were crazy, like on the rooftop of buildings. You know, the idea would be that airplanes would come right into the middle of the city and you'd just take an elevator up and get on the roof and, you know, take off. And there were a couple of major design competitions, one in America, sponsored by Lehigh, Connors. It was huge in 1929 and 150 or 200 architects from around the world. They look like Spanish manor houses or, you know, Tudor cottages. It was very much eclectic, neo-historic kind of styles. But there were a few that were very modern. One of them being Frank Lloyd Wright's son, Lloyd Wright, who did a series of very interesting,

very forward-looking. What could the airplane bring to architecture that would change it and make it ultra-modern? And I think that was a big change. So you have this new kind of architecture. Lucre Rousseau was a huge proponent of air travel. And he designed an airport in his city for $3 million. I think it's 1920 or 21, where the planes would somehow fly between the glass towers and land in the middle of the city. And then there'd be a railway station underneath and highways.

And he then became a good friend of San Exuberet, you know, the famous writer who wrote The Little Prince, but it was also a very famous French pilot. And he would fly him all over Morocco and then later in South America. And he came up with this notion of the pilot's point of view that a modern architect had to understand that aerial perspective, you know, because the future was all about this new dimension that you saw from the air. Alist, tell me about the first real airport in the UK. The one that I know of is the most famous was Croydon, you know, outside of London. Around 1927, 1928, started to open and really be the effect. imperial airport for the British Empire, not just UK, but here are these huge lumbering aircraft, Imperial Airways aircraft, would go off to all points of the British Empire. The architectural style

was sort of this baronial, almost like an estate, you know, a country estate. But it architecturally, on the interior, was really interesting because it was the first that I know of to separate incoming and outgoing passengers, the baggage area, customs area, had big storage area, had big storage area for goods that were being shipped out to, you know, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, whatever, all these points, India all around the world. I suppose if you're the British Empire, it's a bit embarrassing. I mean, ports have grown up reasonably organically, but it's a bit embarrassing. You feel that people landing from over the world, the heart of empire, and it's a kind of

rubbish airfield. I mean, there's a sense from the beginning that these airports are going to need to be publicly funded because they're an advertisement for the country. Yeah, we're certainly in the UK, absolutely. you know, that this was a reflection of the empire in the country. So Croydon Airport was the ancestor, the predecessor. It's all London's airports. It's where imperial airways operated out of, the forerunner of the days British Airways, if you like.

It was the first official international airport. And it was there at Croydon that some of the world's first air traffic control systems were introduced and pioneered and implemented. It was where customs and immigration facilities were experimented with. But by the late 1930s, the aircraft were coming too big, too large for the runway, which was so sandwiched in by urban development, there was no room to expand. So a new site was scouted. It was to the west of London around a hamlet called Heath Row. During the Second World War, the British government requisitioned the land here,

and we're hoping to build a really vast airfield for bombers heading to the war in the far east. thankfully before it could be put to use to that purpose the war ended Britain needed new international airport to replace Coydon and so this area that had been scouted around Heathrow was perfect on the 1st of January in 1946 it opened as a London

airport the name Heathrow didn't actually come for the 1960s interestingly and the first commercial fight to Buenos Aires took place just a few months later on from the beginning this was really an airport facing the future it's built for the future soon muddy fields gave way to paved walkways

and permanent terminals as comfort and leisure became key to the whole experience. Speaking of comfort and leisure, look what I'm just spotted down here. Hello, there's some upscale shops on the other side of me. We've got Louis Vuitton,

we've got Rolex but here in the middle. Very handy, feels like it's an omen, folks. Is the Fortnham and Mason bar. If you've never heard of Fortners and Mason's folks, they're a quintessentially British brand that built its reputation on provisioning explorers, naval officers, and travellers with food that could survive long journeys.

During the polioic wars, for example, it supplied luxury food for soldiers, officials, sailors that had been posted far out across the world, across the empire, looking for that comforting taste of home. And today people are sitting on their high stools. Never really sat here and had a drink or eating anything, but I must say I'm rapidly re-evaluating that right now. They're uncorking bowls of wine.

Hi there. Hi there. Good, thank you. I would love a glass of champagne, please. Sure, I'll get it at fee. In the early days, flying was expensive, and it could be quite glamorous. And Pastrins liked to have a meal or a cocktail before departure, because flying was really supposed to resemble,

supposed to compete with first-class rail or ocean travel. It was all about that elite experience. Here's Alistair again. Alistair, is that a moment when air travel goes from being functional, survival, just clinging on inside a fuselage to get to where you want to go, to being a sort of luxury experience end to end? Yes, I think very early on you have one trip was sort of this very well-bred, went to Yale, had all his Yale and Princeton friends invest in Pan American Airways. It was originally called PAA, and it was a crazy idea, but it was very clubbish. And he got these

sort of society architects to design these very club-like terminals, both in New York, the Marine Air Base, which is now LaGuardia. And down in Miami, he built several different terminals that were designed to really attract the wealthy class. In Miami, they were mainly to go to Cuba or the Bahamas to drink prohibition-era booze. And we call it the Golden Age Shovel, I guess, because it was exclusive, it was luxury, it was expensive. So you'd be on an aircraft and there'd be celebrities and sports stars. It was a minority. It was for the ultra rich.

You can afford to do it, but not normal middle class. It was still pretty much too expensive. And crowds would gather to watch people arrive at airport. I mean, it became a place that you'd travel out to and watch people arriving, I guess, getting back, going to concerts, getting back, going to massive political summits, all that sort of thing. Well, it's like the Beatles landing at JFK in 64 to be on the Ed Sullivan show. You know, that's a great moment.

That was totally theater, and that goes back to almost the earliest days, especially in Europe. Germany, there was this tendency to always put a kind of sports palace kind of seating on the roof of the airport. So it's a famous one in Hamburg, Full Sputtle or something like that, really early, 1927, and it had a huge kind of stadium on the roof because I think it might be the first in Europe, that, again, separated incoming outgoing passengers, but even more importantly, separate. the gawkers, you know, the sightseers who just come to see, well, you know, they're aviation nerds who just want to see the airplanes. They're coming to see the airplanes. But as you said, you know, a lot of people just want to come to see the celebrities or the famous pilots, whoever.

Now, you have these incredible characters who are bigger than life and someone like Lindberg or some of the famous European pilots coming in. So, and I think that continued. In Germany, unfortunately, kind of morphed into the idea for Temple Hoff, when Tempelhof was finally being built under a Nazi regime, it was massive. And the stadium idea, like, took over the whole concept of the airport. And you had thousands of people. And I think the Goebbels figured out if he could invite all the heads of the workers' unions to an air show with these famous German pilots, you know, was like luring the mice into

a trap. And they all came because they wanted to see these fantastic air shows. And then they arrested them. and use the airport kind of as a lure to get these guys in. And in that golden age, I guess Heathrow, that's where the world's coming to no longer coming through Southampton Harbor. They're all landing at Heathrow. They're landing at Heathrow.

But yeah, I remember flying into Heathrow and it being very glamorous. I remember coming in and just arriving. And I was very proud to have dual citizenship and have a British passport. As I recall, my mother making us, you know, I had to wear a blazer with a little patch and a tie, you know, a club tie. My grey flannels and my shoes had to be polished. And we went as a family and we were all incredibly well dressed. I suppose there's a sense that your family were tapping into that the worst is that this was so obviously futuristic.

This was HG Wells. People were flying around these machines landing in these sort of palatial buildings that were organized and clean. And there was none of the kind of crazy mess of the early modern world and sort of people grabbing your possessions as you arrive in a crowded train station somewhere. This is a sort of technocratic science fiction of a world, isn't it? And you thought, well, maybe the future is going to be like this. I think absolutely. I think it was the door to the future. And for many people, and it still is.

I mean, I'd never had that iris scanning thing done. You know, even when I went to the eye dog. I mean, I had pretty good eyes, knocking wood. But, you know, until I went to one of the airports in Europe and they were trying out a new iris scanning system and all of that security stuff, you know, is the future of technology. It's funny you mention the way we interact with the future. I mean, I think the first Irish scanner ever saw airport, the first time I ever saw sushi on a conveyor belt airport, and the first robot that I've ever interacted with was in a Chinese airport a couple of years ago, like an actual genuine robot wandering around, giving information.

And so you're right, that's where we meet the future. By the 1960s, Britain's vision of that future had outgrown the name London Airport. When the airport officially became Heathrow Airport in 1966, the change. was more than cosmetic. It reflected a new reality. London was no longer served by a single airport. Air travel itself had entered a new age, the jet age. Heathrow had become the centrepiece of an expanding network of airports designed to serve a society in which flying was no longer reserved for a privileged few. Air travel was becoming more affordable, more accessible for more people. By the time the airport was renamed in 1966, it was on the cusp of handling around 5 million passengers a year.

But accommodating more passengers wasn't simply a matter of building bigger terminals. More passengers required bigger aircraft than more of them. While travellers experienced the excitement of mass air travel, controllers were solving an increasingly complex logistical challenge, how to safely coordinate a growing number of aircraft taking off and landing safely and efficiently. As Heathrow expanded into one of the world's most connected airports, its control systems work to make possible the very few, sure that the airport promised and became a testing ground for modern air traffic control.

I am airside, folks. I'm surrounded by aircraft engines, starting engines cooling down. Just looking around me now, imagining where all these aircraft are going. I can see some cargo getting put into the belly of an American airline there. I've got a Virgin Atlantic Airbus 330. They are just getting their catering delivered. And I am walking up to. one of the most eye-catching architectural features of this airport. The air traffic control tower, many, many stories higher, huge glass gallery looking out over this field, held up with torched steel cables.

I'm gazing up at it now. I'm wondering if there's going to be a lifter, or I'm climbing all the stairs, because I'm going to go inside now. And we're going to head up to the nerve center of this airport, the brain of the operation. This is the place from which all of the... aircraft movements are organised, it's going to be very exciting. The last time I was in a space

managing air movements, it was in the World War II Battle of Britain bunker in Uxbridge, and I just wonder how much has changed. Hello there. Hi Donne. Nice to meet you. How's it going? Very well, thank you. My name is Edie Dolan. I'm the head of air traffic control training at Heathrow. Well thank you very much for having me. It's exciting to be here. What should we go and look at? What's going on? First of all, let's look at what's going to look at what's going. an air traffic controller would do when they come up to work. So the first thing they do is look at this screen that we have here, which shows us what's happening on the airport right now.

Every single aircraft movement on the air. Yep, we've got the aircraft on the ground, moving around, the inbound and the outbounds, and we've also got what's happening in the air. This is London. That's pretty congested, isn't it? It is. It's the busiest airspace in the world. Really?

It is. Yeah. Nowhere busy than this. I'm sorry to be a history of UK, but they are the equivalent of those amazing big maps you see at R. REF Uxbridge and those Power 2 mats, people moving them around with the old pool keys. Sliding it, sliding it around.

Yeah, but that's the modern version of that. But in some ways, it's very, very similar indeed, I suppose. Let's go upstairs. Let's go and see it for real, yeah. Right then. You love this. You will love this. Check out these.

Oh my goodness, look at these. Hang on a second. German artillery binoculars. Oh, yes. Is ice artillery binoculars. Are you kidding me? Look at the picture. Here they are.

Yes, like range finders. Yeah. So there's a picture here on the wall of a German unit, maybe in the desert campaign, and they're looking through these Zeiss binoculars to try and calculate the range of the incoming aircraft. And you've got, what on earth? How come you got these here? We've got no idea. You got no idea? But they have been at Heathrow since the 1950s.

Through our three control towers that we've had, this is the third one we've had, and they've made it through every single control tower, and they are stunning. They're still working, they're in perfect working order. So it's still operating today? in the Heathrow Tower. Let me have a look. Oh my gosh, wow, I can see that is extraordinary. I can read the license plate on that vehicle,

on that pickup truck. That's so far where I can hardly see it with the naked eye. We still use them. They're an operational piece of equipment. Really? Yeah, superb. And if you look at all the rest of technology in the tower, it's a great contrast.

It is a bit of a contrast. Because we're surrounded by massive flat screens and laser computer terminals. Yeah. It blend up here, isn't it? It's old and new. Yeah, I mean, so the role itself has remained the same but actually the technology allows us to have much better decision-making.

We've got loads of tools, loads of information at our disposal, but it's still the human at the centre of all the decision-making. And there is indeed a human right behind us in an extraordinary 360-degree work terminal situation surrounded by screens. So this controller is our A South controller. So they are looking at the runway to the south of us, it's runway 27 left, and that runway right now is being used for all the departing aircraft. So his job is to take the aircraft as they reach the start of the runway,

and it'll all be on a preset route. There are six routes out of Heathrow, and he'll be jumbling them all up to try and get the most efficient departure sequence. His job won't have changed that much in terms of the Ranger, which he's dealing with aircraft, for decades. No, it'll stay exactly the same. And once he's finished with his job, so we'll see this aircraft turn towards the left at some point,

and then once it's clean of Heathrow, we call it being clean, so it's not going to conflict with any other traffic. He can transfer onto the radar controllers down at Swanick, and then that controller will take it on to the next bit, and the next bit, and the next bit, and everybody looks after their particular portion. That's extraordinary. Well, there's a National Enronautical Library down in Farnborough,

and you can pull out the original approach charts for Heathrow, and if you look at approach chart now, it's accurate to within half a metre. It tells you exactly where to be in Latin long, but the depiction at the top of the chart just describes Heathrow as being 12 nautical miles west of Westminster Bridge. That's it. You've got to find it for it.

from there. You can imagine these pilots heading for the bridge and they go, oh, must be 12 miles this way. And did you have a bit of high vis or something painted on the ground going, this is Heathrow, yes. Yeah, well, actually in the gossometer towers over here towards Northall,

there were two arrows, one pointed to Northall and one pointed to Heathrow, so that pilots didn't land at the wrong airport. You imagine that kind of stuff today's, it's a world away, isn't it? We expect zero casualties in the industry now. We're flying with satellite-based navigation now, and it's a lot more accurate.

What's some of those big, big steps forward I suppose if you split it into aircraft and then air traffic control, everything that's really big in aviation has been a world first of Heathrow. So you go from those original airliners through to the jetty, to the comet, the 707s, and then you've got the 747. Then you move on to the age of Concord and all the way through to the A380s, the double deckers that we've seen today. And then through to the most fuel efficient aircraft, the A350s, 787s that were operating today. And then you look at air traffic control and we've gone from rudimentary, massive, massive. massive primary radars and old-fashioned radios to digital stuff, modest surveillance, where we can see aircraft on a pinpoint on the screen.

Again, Heathrow's been at the forefront of all of that. And now we're separating aircraft on final approach, rather with vast distances and miles. We're separating them by seconds, so we can actually time how long an aircraft will be on the approach so that everybody is accurately sequenced in a perfect line. So, yeah, it's all happened here first. And I guess, even though this wasn't at World War II,

during the Battle of Britain, the British, the RF pioneered airspace management did lay the way they still recognise. Yeah. So those rudimentary systems of radar, VHF radio, they're still in use today. We're using them right now. This is the way that the controllers are moving near after hour. We're using a VHF radio to talk to an airplane and tell it what to do. So the actions of those people, the pioneers back in the 1940s, are still being used to do.

The Jess Age changed everything. By the 1960s air travel was less about an extraordinary experience. and more about making it available to an extraordinary number of people. I have very early memory, because I'm old enough, of landing in Goose Bay, which was in Greenland. We would leave Prestwick, which was the original bigger airport for Transatlantic in Scotland. And I think we'd go from Preswick to Shannon, because that was the closest to the U.S. from the British Isles, refuel. And then from Shannon to Goose Bay in either Newfoundland. or Greenland. There were two different stops there. And I remember coming out as a child and standing

in this freezing cold hangar. In your blazer, that must have been tough. In the blazer, yeah, definitely. Thank you for remembering that. Yeah, still looking, you know, a little bit haggard, but still looking very proper. And that was kind of amazing. So suddenly you had these jets that could go the whole distance. And in such a short time, five and a half hours from New York to Heathrow. I mean, it literally influenced everything from architecture and transportation to fashion. And I think what we said earlier about the Beatles, you know, the fact that the Beatles could fly on Pan Am to New York and be on the Ed Sullivan show the next day or whenever it was and then fly down to Miami a day later or two days later and be on again on the Ed Sullivan show. But from Miami, they just caught the moment more perfectly than anyone in terms of a cultural revolution. The fashion was like Italian designers like Pucci were designing the interiors of the air.

airplanes, you know, and they were designing the stewardesses' outfits, and it was just incredibly sexy and incredibly modern and just cool, been fantastically cool. There's a whole generation of furniture that's based on airline design, you know, post-jet age concepts of aerodynamic movement, you know, which really all these ideas changed as soon as the jets came in. And so you're going long distances, you're going fast on these big jet aircraft, but you're also moving around a lot of people, right? Do we arrive at the truly, the kind of mass market of travel at that point? You begin the mass market moment of transport with the jumbo jets where suddenly it's not 80 people in an airplane or 90 people. What is it 300? It's something like that. So suddenly all the

more intimate terminals of the 60s and early 70s, they're obsolete. Within eight years, they're obsolete. Is it changing where people go? Are they vacationing, but they're doing business trips? But they're starting just kind of commute almost on aircraft at this point. Yeah. It had a huge exposure. just in the tourist industry, you know, in places like in the Caribbean, which maybe had these sleepy ships coming around once a month and sort of tired, pale English tourists would get off, you know, and have tea. And your auntie would do it because she had time to do it, but modern businessmen or whatever didn't have the time for that.

So it opened up this huge window of opportunity in places like Jamaica and Nassau and, you know, in the Bahamas and all through the West Indies and all through South. America too. So a businessman from Bogota could come to New York for two days and fly back and bring his wife and kids and have a vacation. So all those wonderful tourism posters from the 60s are all part of that world. So exotic. And the whole notion of the jet and the jet setting travel and all the early ads where, you know, you could have breakfast in New York and dinner at the Savoy in London, you know, and all that kind of stuff. And then many of the companies, many of the really successful companies had these kind of development divisions that were building and buying hotels and resort.

So it was all part of the package. You know, the way early railway companies would buy up areas of land in Britain and in America, because it was very cheap land and then develop it into that whole movement in Britain of suburban commuter kind of villages outside of London. Similar, but more like around the world in places that never had a fancy hotel, you know. And as the jet age sped onto the scene, a new terminal was needed to handle the millions of people now taking to the skies. Hello. Look at this.

I was walking through an airport terminal. Just mothballed. It's like a post-apocalyptic movie. What area are we coming to now? So this was the International Departial Lounge back in the day. Okay, so passengers come through here. We said, this is World Trade Free, used to have all the poshions. shops down here.

Boss. On the walls. So this is where, you know, after you've gone through security and you're sitting here for a few hours before you get on the plane. And when does it date from? 1968. This is the classic.

That golden age of that. So folks, have you ever looked at the subway map, the Tune map of London? And you look at that dark blue Piccadilly line, you'll notice that it ends at Heathrow, but you see terminals two, three, three, four, five. And you're probably thinking,

why is the no Terminal One? Well, Terminal 1 still exists, but it is closed to the public, it is mothboard, because that's where I'm now walking through this ghostly relic of an airport terminal, just walking down these little corridors into these cavernous spaces.

This one I'm coming into now was the original Departures Hall. There's all the desks, the signs still here, the zones where you check in. The lights are off, it's partly lit. I mean, folks, the nearest approximation I give you is that it's like the set of a zombie film. It's amazing to think this was the building that paved the way for the modern understanding of the airport. This, when it opened in 1969, was just cutting edge, a whole idea of this big passenger check-in hall,

the fast track security, the restaurants, the bars on the other side. This was all super exciting. And it also marked the transition from air travel as a niche activity of a super luxury activity to something that everyday normal people could aspire to. This was built to process a million people a year. And it gave us the blueprint for the airport we recognised today. This was the original Concord Terminal. When he first started to fly, I used to fly from here.

It was the Bahrain flights first, before it was allowed to go across the Atlantic. And then from here, you used to have the weekend Barbados flights from here. You could fly to Barbados the weekend on Concord? Yeah. Saturday morning, 10.20, I think it was. So as it was when it was closed down just over a decade ago.

It's mysterious, isn't it? Time travel. The jet age didn't just transform the passenger experience. It also revolutionized air freight and often overlooked but crucial part of the story of the jet age. While aircraft had always carried mail and small consignment since the early 20th century, the arrival of jet airliners transformed what was possible. Faster, larger and able to fly further than ever before, jets turned airports into engines of global. commerce. By the 1970s, wide-bodied aircraft, such as the Boeing 747, were carrying not only

hundreds of passengers, but also tons of cargo beneath their feet. In the decades that followed, global supply chains, express parcel services, and e-commerce would make air freight indispensable. If the jet age shrank the wealth of travellers, it also shrank it for trade, allowing goods to cross continents overnight, and making airports the modern crossroads of the global economy. modern Silk Road of sorts. So let's step behind the seats into the hidden airport that most of us never even realize exists when we travel

through the very visible airport. This is like a scene out of Toy Story. We've come into working along a raised gantry, a raised platform, and we're looking down at a fast-moving conveyor belt on which there are loads

and loads of boxes and parcels and packages, some very small, something like envelopes. Some really big. And then they are in turn sliding down all sorts of shoots to be gathered up and placed in big containers to be put on in holes of planes. It is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life. And here I'm meeting Alan. How are you, mate? Nice to meet you, Ben.

Good to see you, buddy. I'm Alan, Alan, Alan Smiley. I'm the Senior Director for Operations for London Heathrow and London Luton. And I'm the UK Network Planning Group Director for DHSA Aviation. So a very long title. Great to have you here. This is a lot of responsibility. Yes.

I don't trust myself with my phone. You're running out. How big it? I can't even see to the other end. Yeah, I mean, I started in this facility when I was 19 years old. I've worked for DHL for 25 years, so we're very proud of this facility. This is London Heathrow Hub. This is where we connect material via our DHL cargo freighters, as well as our commercial airline partners.

It's so exciting, isn't it? We all live in a world where we can access goods from all over the planet. We are used to having these deliver to our home. We can get really anything we want now so quick and level for a new ministry. What we're looking at here is the structure that makes that all happen. This is what goes on behind the scenes 24 hours a day. That's correct. This is a 24-7 operation. We're open on Christmas Day. Cargo doesn't stop. How many objects a day?

Okay, in a let's say 2 a.m. to 2pm delivery cycle that we will call it here. We would sort between 45,000 pieces to 50,000 pieces. on a normal day and in our peak periods we can go up to 65 to 70,000 pieces. So you're talking millions a week? We're talking, yeah, close on to a million a week. What are some of the wildest things you've seen? Well, look, probably the weirdest and most wonderful thing that we have had through this facility is a gorilla. An actual gorilla?

A gorilla, yeah. It received special handling. You'll be glad to note it didn't go around the sort system or be moved around here. But it's actually Kibuli, the gorilla. that is now in London Zoo at the moment. He came in here in a few years ago now and received special handling via the Canary Islands into Madrid, into London,

special handling, special aircraft handling, and then we moved him through to his place now in London Zoo. So he's happy? Seems very happy. We took a bunch of school children as part of our purpose banner down to London Zoo and we were delighted to see him there and he has a full family now.

So we see a lot of car parts, spare parts, We'll also see some manufacturing, a lot of industrial mining equipment to places such as Western Australia is very popular as well. We also see medical equipment, large medical life-saving equipment that we move through the life science industries. We do move race horses. That's out of a different airport. Race horses. Yeah, horses. Yeah, I definitely think the big buzz for us, because we're a company that loves sport is when the lions.

material comes through. Yeah, I mean. And it works. They got the wind. So that was for me always quite cool, right? You see the guys running out and we move the rugby ball. So the balls, the food that they're eating. We're helping get the team prepared.

I guess when I think about travel, I think mostly of people. And when I think of sea travel, I think mostly of goods. What I'm learning today is that that is not the case at all. So if we talk about Heathrow specifically, DHS had operations here since the early 1980s. So if it stops, you notice it immediately. You would absolutely see potentially delays to medical appointments, operations, financial services, you would see backups potentially of medicines that you can supply chains of perishables as well,

food that is imported to the country and out of the country. The things that we take for granted on a day-to-day basis that we just go online now and click and we expect it there in two days, well they'll take seven, ten, fifteen days, because it back up because the world doesn't stop. So those suits, those dresses, those shoes, those kitchen appliances that you want to do, it would all be delayed and your everyday life would So much of this the character of our modern world the way that we consume and shop and It's dependent on facilities like this. I mean they really are ports just as London would have been a great port Venice back in the day with a great port. There are two different things going at Heathrow. There's a huge cargo community in itself at Heathrow Airport, right? There's a labyrinth of

cargo tunnels or people that are dedicated to work in the cargo industry. When you sit in your seat and you look out, what you can't see is the hundreds of shipments that are safely, screamed and compliantly loaded into the belly of the aircraft at Heathrow. We use over 55 to 60 aircraft a day from this facility to transatlantic to the Middle East into Europe, long haul, wide-body cargo friendly aircraft. It happens on every flight. It's a world that never sleeps.

The moment a plane touches down, an invisible army of handlers, customs officers, engineers and logistics specialists spring into action. Within hours, goods that have travelled halfway around the world are on motorways, hospitals, on supermarket shelves, or heading for another continent. Again, it's just a reminder that the airport is just a central part of this modern world that we've built.

So I'm back in departures now. You can buy everything here. And this is an indication that the airport is a shopping destination. It is a retail experience. It is like a mall in here. I occasionally buy some souvenirs to my kids at the airports. But long gone are the days when those are all that's for sale, a bit of water and some key rings.

There are all sorts of things to buy and do in this place. The airport is changing and it's growing. It's becoming something entirely new. It's really becoming a destination in its own right. Once you get through that gauntlet, You're in this kind of paradise of consumerism now where they have these super luxury shopping malls. There are things you can't get it even in Paris or London, you know, the wealthy people go to, you know, just to shop. Well, they're going someplace, but they wait to buy their Lebuton shoes at the new terminal.

And that's kind of fascinating. And that goes back to just after World War II and they realized it wasn't enough to charge, you know, landing fees that you needed to have some other kind of retail income at airports to make them pay. for themselves. I did a podcast about a year ago. It was all about who buys luggage at the airport. Like, why would you do that? Whoever does that? And I said, I do. When I was working journalist, I had a crappy bag that I couldn't find the bag I like. I ended up in, I think, yeah, I was Istanbul, which has this beautiful new terminal. I mean, incredibly fancy. And there was a great bag that I would never have bought in a million years, you know, in my normal life. But you're just sitting there again for three or four hours, right, waiting for your plane.

And I got it. And I think shopping is a huge, you know, makes people feel better. Is the one that you identify, the first time an airport looks like a shopping mall? Yeah, the earliest one post-war in America, Baltimore. They were trying to compete with Washington, D.C. and New York and Philadelphia. So it's a very competitive market on the mid-Atlantic in the U.S. And they went out of their way. It's called Friendship Airport, huge airport, sprawling kind of place,

bigger than anything in the states at the time. And Life magazine did a huge spread on and it showed like this beauty salon. There was a big bookstore. There were fancy restaurants, shoe shine, you know, that you could do almost anything there and had all these shops. I think it was the first that really had everything. There were others that planned for it. And it never did well. It kind of went bankrupt at a certain point. But JFK, the early plans by Wallace Harrison, Harrison, had married into the Rockefeller family and, you know, was the one who was the master planner of Lincoln Center and the United Nations. You know, he was this big master planner thinker. And he had been commissioned in the 50s to come up with an idea for a new New York airport, Idlewild. And the idea was kind of

so far ahead of its time because it was all about these huge shopping malls that you enter first through the shopping malls and the city of New York would make all this great income from that. So it was a concept that goes pretty far back. And yet now here we were. are and places like Singapore have got botanical gardens, movie theaters. I mean, it's wild. The butterfly garden is the greatest in Singapore. What does a future airport look like, do you think? There are few around the world now, but in San Francisco, I love when I go in there because there's a great yoga meditation room that's just incredibly quiet and gentle when you go in there and you don't feel like you're an airport. I think airports are going to have to have more and more of these kind of downtime places for reflection and meditation. Again, this is another mark of the future, you know, kind of future visions.

They're often places that architecturally and engineering-wise, you use concepts that haven't been used anywhere else because they're reaching for kind of a different, almost utopian vision of what the future is going to bring. So it's going to come from some engineering genius that rethinks the whole basic concept of what an airport is. I think that's coming. And there are people who are working on those kinds of ideas.

And the idea of the environmentally correct airport, How does such a thing exist? But people are talking about that, writing about that a lot now. I'm on the gallery now looking down at the crowded concourse. I can see excited families. I can see solo travelers. I can see exhausted people having a snooze. All of life is here, folks.

It's the cusp of the summer holidays. The planes are lined up outside. The sun is shining. There's something about airports. I remember as a kid it meant going to see my grandma in Canada. Canada. As an adult it's meant, being lucky enough to travel over the world, look at some of the greatest historical sites and talk about them to all of you folks. Whatever age, there's something deeply exciting about these strange and remarkable places. Thanks so much for listening to

this episode, Dan Snow's History. I hope it's helped you while away some time. Will you waiting for your next flight? Or it'll make you think differently about traveling through that airport next time. The many fun facts on here to share with your travel companions, certainly. I'd like to thank all of my guests at Heathrow Airport. And of course, Alastair Gordon, you can find out more in his book, Naked Airport. In the meantime, if you want to know more about the history of Heathrow, you can discover more at Heathrow.com slash 80.

We'll put the link in the show notes. See you next time. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's history and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like How William Conquered England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era? And you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week,

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