The Aiport – everything you ever wanted to know about the airport and more!

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History of Heathrow

If you’ve been to Heathrow in London you’ll know that it is an enormous place with bustling terminal buildings and stretches of runways. In fact, today nearly 70 million people use the airport every year – that’s over 190,000 every single day!

However, this busy airport was little more than a grassy field 70 years ago.

Back in 1930, aeroplanes were still quite new.  When a plane went overhead, people below would probably have been very excited, not like today where we hardly notice!

Heathrow started off as a place where new aircraft were assembled and tested. In fact it wasn’t called Heathrow back then, it was the Great Western Aerodrome.  And it wouldn’t have looked anything like today’s airport– more like a large field!  But it was about to get busier!

Over the following year, aeroplanes became more and more common as people grew excited about the opportunities of air travel.

Within a couple of decades, holidays abroad would be something that more and more families could afford – often to places like Spain, places that are still popular today.

To meet this new demand, the government took over the Aerodrome in the late 1940s to begin building an airport for the public, and they renamed it “Heathrow”.  The new airport started with a series of tents and a simple runway.  But as more and more people began to travel by plane, more modern passenger facilities were built, with the first purpose built terminal opened in 1955.