A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, by Alain de Botton
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Travel, Philosophy, Books, Airports, Infrastructure

A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, by Alain de Botton

Writing about photographing about talking about airports

My flight from Brisbane to Sydney had been delayed en route, due to 60kph winds at Sydney leaving only one runway operational, and so the plane was directed into a holding pattern. Presumably we were stacked alongside other aircraft, though none were visible. (This piece written October 24, 2009; see also this companion photo-essay.)

The Australian landscape had also disappeared surprisingly quickly into the gloom of evening outside the window, a gigantic land mass suddenly and easily secreted away. On take-off from Brisbane an hour earlier, ascending above the mangroves and oil refineries at the mouth of the Brisbane River, the lower stratosphere of South East Queensland had been suffuse with a yellowy haze from the dust storms apparently now firmly ensconced along the east coast. But now the view out of the thick starboard window was complex in composition and banal in content, a multi-layered montage of grime and moisture in the foreground, vast inhuman darkness pocked by the odd spot of light in the background, and my trousers reflected in the cabin reading light somewhere in-between.

The delay, which again reminds me of the brittle nature of the oft-inappropriately-named civil aviation (and the essentially unsustainable nature of domestic commercial aviation in the long run), does however give me enough time to both start and finish Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport, his account of spending, well, a week at the airport, as writer-in-residence at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, courtesy of BAA.

To my mild surprise, I enjoyed it hugely.

I’d picked it up at Brisbane airport’s sorry-excuse-for-a-bookshop, like I had previously picked up Jacques Attali’s A Brief History of the Future and Stephen Carrol’s The Art of the Engine Driver, both of which had also been enjoyable — a decent hit-rate from a poor shop, so far. De Botton’s is a small book, like those I referenced here, and that too was in its favour. (The book is also punctuated by rather nice documentary photographs by Richard Baker.)

I’ve had issues with De Botton’s work in the past, most of which are too nebulous to articulate, or indeed dwell on. But constraining the man in this format — literally constraining him to one location, and then to the format of a short book — seems to have worked. There’s a focus and passion to the writing, at least in his reserved English-Swiss style, that is also insightful and, at a few points, genuinely affecting. It’s also funny.

De Botton can be critiqued for lack of critique. He’s about as far from the ‘intellectual as attack dog’ that you recall Denis Healey’s description of Geoffrey Howe — “like being savaged by a dead sheep” (which would actually be rather unpleasant, when you think about it). Yet behind the pale visage and courteously benign manner there does lurk a subtle critique of sorts. In this context of Heathrow, he repeatedly points out the associated externalities (destruction of green belt, carbon emissions, noise, negative first impressions of Britain, and so on). But they’re expressed as mere descriptors rather than sustained critique. Put simply, he doesn’t stick the boot in and he clearly could’ve done.

Perhaps with this in mind, he addresses the issue of his patron, BAA, right away, and does so carefully, thoughtfully, and with humour. He’s intensely aware of his delicate position here, and the power structures around him. He partly suggests that the new economic reality of the publishing industry has made him consider this alternative, and ancient, business model of the wealthy patron. I’m not sure that’s relevant. It’s a well-understood model, and we can judge the book on its merits, reading between lines as we see fit. As mentioned above, BAA have chosen a writer that is hardly going to stick the boot in; at worst, a thin smile disguising a delicate stiletto nick. So having been given the green light to say what he likes, de Botton would clearly jump at the chance of this commission.

And who wouldn’t? Airports are fascinating places, and emblematic tokens of our civilisation. This last year has been a year of flying for me. I’ve probably done over 2000 km per week for the last year, on average (with an appropriately hideous carbon footprint as a result) and so I’ve overly familiar with certain of these spaces. But curiously, I still enjoy them, as places. They perform a compression of so many things that the experience is both everyday (almost) and surreal simultaneously.

And de Botton picks apart that paradox from almost every angle one can imagine, for his starting point is that the airport is essentially the emblematic human structure:

In a world full of chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic. It was the imaginative centre of contemporary culture. Had one been asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through our civilisation — then it would have to be to the departures and arrivals halls that one would head.

A Week at the Airport is not as learned or as deep as David Pascoe’s rich cultural audit Airspaces (part of the brilliant Topographics series). Then again, it’s not one quarter as long. But Pascoe’s book does dwell on a figure that is absent at the feast here. The one figure who would really explore a space such as this, suggesting its essence through an entirely different mode, and thus via all the angles one would not imagine. A figure whose relatively recent absence is felt all the more keenly when reading this book.

Ballard.

In Ballard’s utopian vision, even the curtain-walling of the terminal buildings and the multi-storey car-parks behind them belonged to an enchanted domain; such houses ‘of glass, of flight and possibility’ are, according to the narrator (whose surname happens to be Ballard), ‘the departure point for our own lives and deaths’. Almost a quarter of a century later, this stark view of airspace seems unchanged: ‘Airports and airfields have always held a special magic, gateways to the infinite possibilities that only the sky can offer.’ [From Airspaces, by David Pascoe]

Anyway. Back down to earth, and de Botton’s book will have to suffice.