The Cranford Agreement
Circumnavigating Heathrow on foot
Scroll to continue
On my first attempt at circumnavigating Heathrow on foot I was nearly arrested. I had decided to walk around the perimeter of the airport on the same day that the then prime minister Tony Blair had ordered the army to station tanks at Terminal 1 due to a suspected terrorist threat. On that day, the spectator balcony was closed so I decided to go for a walk.
Over the years the area around the airport has morphed ever so slightly. In 2004 I came across an abandoned sofa in a small forest clearing. Fifteen years later the same area is overgrown but still a dumping ground but you can now spot the roof of Terminal 5 in the distance.
The Cranford Agreement refers to a somewhat obscure oral agreement between the United Kingdom Government and the local community that surrounds Heathrow airport about the usage of its runways. Every day at 3pm when the airport is on westerlies (with traffic approaching the airport over central London) the arrival runway becomes the departing runway and vice-versa, giving residents under the arriving runway a rest bite from the noise. This rhythm has dictated not only many of my walks but more important the quality of the lives of the people living under the flightpath.
When you walk the same route over and over again you learn every nuance of its neighbourhoods. You spot the small developments. Where there was once a muddy path, there is now a wooden walk way. You see houses empty out only for new people to move in. It's the constant mix between the mundane of the everyday set against the spectacular sight of low flying aircraft, arriving or departing from all corners set against the domestic life of people who just live here for whom this traffic is just the background, not their foreground.
Julio
It was raining hard and I was looking for shelter. Almost out of nowhere, a man appears and kindly offers to share his umbrella with me. He is on his way to work in Terminal 4’s duty free area. We walk together towards Hatton Cross. He stops intermittently so I can take photos of incoming aircraft. He keeps his umbrella over my head as I do. He explains to me that the area where he lives is really dangerous these days. It didn’t used to be the case.
He has been in the UK for ten years; he came from Dubai and is of Indian and Portuguese descent. “Brexit must happen” he tells me. “There are too many people here now. We should expel all the criminals. It didn’t use to be like this. This country is now a dangerous country.” He is going to move in with his sister soon. Back in the day you could buy a house here for £10,000; now they sell for £500,000 he says. His wife and daughter are in India and he sends money back to them every month.
We stop again so I can take some photos of an American Airlines 777 as it thunders overhead. For a moment I wonder what first class on American must be like. Life is hard, he explains, but that’s the way it is. We part ways by the gas station. I wish him and his family the best of luck. He walks across the busy dual carriageway and is stuck in the central reservation, waiting for a gap in the traffic. I suspect what Julio wants back is the time of Concorde.
The Rising
Right next to one of the runways I spot a family of four: a grandfather and three children. They are wheeling an empty pram along the narrow dirt path right up against the fence that separates the airport from the Northern Perimeter Road. The kids are all dressed in yellow. They throw a few rocks about innocently. The setup is reassuring, terrifying and beautiful. The yellow of the children’s clothes glow in the evening sunshine. Jets glide right past them for landing. I wave at them and the grandfather waves back. The children look at me with suspicion. We meet at the bus stop. He tells me in broken English that they came to see the landings, but not the rising.
The Cranford Agreement is an ongoing project and this is but a small edit of the thousands of photos I have made during countless circuits around the airport. During these walks I have met all sorts of people; plane enthusiasts, fellow walkers and cyclists and airport employees but few passengers. I have been chased off private property, stopped by the police and once got lost around Terminal 4.