When was the last time you were shouted at by a stranger wearing a lanyard? Or spent hours in a crowded public space with low ceilings and no natural light? Or paid £8.50 for a Pret sandwich? I’ll wager it was in a British airport, the unnatural habitat of humiliation, discomfort and rip-offs. Not to mention ugliness, rudeness and inefficiency.
Airports do not have to be this awful. Traveling through Rome’s Fiumicino (officially Leonardo da Vinci) Airport, for example, is a joyful, uplifting experience. The place is full of light, superb espresso, fresh-made pasta, pizza and ice-cream. Hard-core junk food addicts can find a McDonalds and a KFC, but they’re tucked away in a corridor far from the glories of the Italian-only food court.
The shops are stunning. Fabriano – founded in 1264 – offers leather bound books, satchels and notepaper. Gallo has its trademark stripey socks, braces, tights and gloves, Borselino is stocked with hand-blocked fur felt fedoras. Its a very far cry from the mini British high street reproduced in our airports. And for those who require it, there are clean, transparent smoking areas throughout – unlike Gatwick, where you have to pay £40 for access to the only lounge that allows smoking. Heathrow has no smoking lounges at all.
At Fiumicino nobody shouts at you when you go through security. Staff are relaxed and friendly. As a result the security is lightning-fast. Nobody has unpacked laptops and liquids for years because Fiumicino invested in Computed Tomography (CT) scanners a decade before Heathrow or Gatwick. And those scanners have a rejection rate of under 5 per cent. Gatwick’s CT scanners, on the other hand, when they were finally installed last year rejected over 60 per cent of bags which had to be laboriously hand-searched. Even when we finally try to do things right we don’t get it right.
But what really elevates Fiumicino to God-level coolness is the presence, everywhere, of tasteful exhibits of ancient statuary, mosaics and frescoes excavated in nearby Ostia Antica, Rome’s answer to Pompeii. The main lounge at Terminal One hosts rotating exhibits of historic artefacts on loan from museums or sites undergoing renovation. Last summer they put up stunning stained glass windows borrowed from the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. These windows, dating to 1310 and featuring the prophet Aaron and two holy deacons, were designed by Giotto di Bondone. In the airport. Fiumicino, you’re just showing off now.
To nobody’s surprise, Fiumicino has just been voted the best airport in Europe for the ninth consecutive year. Nine years. That’s not a review, it’s a civilisational statement – and one that we in Britain should find rather shaming.
Somewhere in the postwar years we decided that comfort and elegance were frivolities
On paper, Italy is actually poorer than us. Their nominal GDP per capita is £29,800, ours is £39,400. Yet for some mysterious reason Italy manages not to be broken, ugly and miserable.
Ultimately, making public spaces beautiful is a choice. For Italians, there is no separation between aesthetics and utility. They do not regard beauty as a luxury to be considered once everything practical has been built. The guiding principle of is a precise inversion of Le Corbusier’s maxim that something can’t be beautiful if it’s not functional. In Italy something that is not beautiful cannot be considered to be functional. This applies, by the way, also to Italian trains which are fast, clean, beautiful and cheap, as well as Italian attitudes to life in general. (The flip side of this reverence for quality of life, however, is an inconvenient addiction to strikes).
In Britain we made a different bargain. Somewhere in the postwar years we decided that comfort and elegance were frivolities. What mattered was efficiency, value, and function. The irony is that we ended up achieving none of these things. Instead we ended up committed to a sort of aggressive, dysfunctional joylessness that pervades all our public spaces.
How to fix this? Given that a third runway at Heathrow has been in the works for 30 years, it’s probably too much to expect for the big-box cattle-pens that pass for London’s airports be demolished and replaced with something more appealing. But adding some museum-type displays of lovely British things should not be beyond the wit of man. Where to source the exhibits is obvious to anyone who’s visited the wonderful V&A East storehouse in Hackney Wick. Like an IKEA for historic treasures, rows and rows of sealed boxes full of wonders stand on endless shelves, tantalising and unexamined. Put them in Heathrow instead. Insurance shouldn’t be a problem because airports are, by definition, far more secure than any museum in the world.
Our front-of-house staff need a bit of work, too. Start perhaps by explaining to airport employees that they are in a customer service role, not members of some kind of minimum-wage Stasi. Gently remind them that passengers are clients who are paying their wages. As it stands, British airport workers seem to operate on a philosophy that is essentially penal. The passenger is a problem to be processed, a walking unit of inconvenience to be moved from one holding zone to another until eventually released into a better place – not in Britain.
Heathrow – our flagship, our boast, the supposed gateway to Global Britain – is a monument to managed misery. Gatwick, Stansted and Luton (in descending order) are worse. High time we began, like Italians, to see our airports as Britain’s storefront and our pride, not a showcase of our national enshittification.
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