Mark Crinson: Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape

Drawing on his recently published book Aviationland (Paul Mellon Centre Studies in British Art), architectural historian Mark Crinson examines Heathrow not only as one of Britain’s key infrastructures, but also its relation to its hinterland and to its little known pre-history. He suggests that our understanding of the airport – even when government raises the perennial topic of the third runway or when news media report a new reason for mass cancellation of flights – always focuses on high-level matters of global connectedness or its contribution to the national economy.  Architectural history has contributed to this focus through its obsession with techno-futurism, while literary and artistic representations still resort to versions of postmodern loss of affect. In contrast, Crinson adopts very different framing devices, looking at both sides of Heathrow’s temporal and physical parameters to understand its relation to the landscape of waste land (going back to the eighteenth century), and its relation to its hinterland (through noise pollution or terraforming, for instance). As a result, three different forms of enclosure hove into our view of this area: that of the agrarian revolution, the nationalisation of land under wartime conditions, and the neo-liberal privatisations of the 1980s. Through these optics, the architecture, landscape, and infrastructure of ‘aviationland’ begin to look very different.

This event is organised by Professor Steve Edwards, Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art, The Courtauld.