London’s ridiculous number of airports

- and most aren’t even near London

Did you know that there are 22 airports that are considered to be London airports?

Most of them are not for normal holiday and business travel but are instead for general aviation (such as used by private jets and for recreational flying) and include Blackbushe Airport in deepest Hampshire, yet dubbed ‘London’s most efficient airport’, and London Elstree Aerodome, situated not far from Watford, outside Greater London, in Hertfordshire.

Only London City Airport and London Heathrow in the London Borough of Hillingdon (and London Biggin Hill if you’re counting airports that don’t serve normal commercial air services, and London Heliport, if you count heliports) really feel that they are truly geographically in London.

London Gatwick is in West Sussex, London Luton Airport is in Bedfordshire, and London Stansted is in Essex - all being located around 30 miles from central London.

The confusion over when a ‘London’ airport is really a London airport was highlighted earlier this month when Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch intervened as thousands of people have been fined in recent years for using Oyster cards and contactless cards to get from London Stansted Airport to the capital.

“With ‘London’ in its name, people quite reasonably assume that they’ll be able to tap out using a contactless card,” Michael Roberts, chief executive of London transport watchdog London TravelWatch, told the Daily Telegraph.

There’s also London Southend, in the nether reaches of Essex: another three miles and it would fall into the sea. London Oxford Airport in Oxfordshire is even cheekier, being 62 miles from the capital.

The argument for giving an airport a ‘London’ designation is primarily the speed you can get from it into London. For example, Southend Airport was given a London designation by international airline body IATA in 2012 as both London’s Stratford and London Liverpool Street stations are under an hour away from the airport by train. 

But you can get from Edinburgh to Glasgow by train in about an hour too, yet Glasgow Airport hasn’t been designated Glasgow Edinburgh Airport - yet.

Birmingham Airport and Southampton Airport have both been suggested as alternative airports for London due to their direct train links to London, and Birmingham airport has argued that the high speed train project HS2 strengthens its case for it to be a London Airport.

If it seems a degree of rebranding has been going on, stretching the laws of geography in the process, then that does seem to be the case. The general aviation airport in Kent known for many years as Lydd has been rebranded London Ashford Airport, for example.

No doubt it won’t be long before there’ll be a London Cardiff Airport, London Aberdeen Airport and London Newquay Airport…

In designating all these ‘London’ airports, perhaps IATA were inspired by Ryanair CEO Michael ‘a plane is just a bus with wings’ O’Leary, whose company got very creative with the geography of airports too, when it began to expand. Many Ryanair passengers have complained over the years about landing at airports supposedly serving cities that were in fact many miles from them.