What use is Manston? A geography lesson for corporate ‘local’ media

Anyone who uses Facebook will have noticed a pattern recently: that their news feed has less of their friends’ posts and more adverts and clickbait from various ‘news’ sites. The clickbait is often poorly written and poorly edited churnalism from sites that used to be local newspapers but have been lumped together in corporate buyouts, with names like “Lancashire Live”, and every time you open one, you see the same prompts to agree to cookies that you saw the previous umpteen times you read an article on the same news source’s website (but it appears again, because it was under another brand name, e.g. Yorkshire Live), the same offers to accept their notifications that you also saw when viewing that sites’ other articles under other brands, and the same adverts which appear in between paragraphs while you try to read the text. Quite often the writing reflects someone’s absolute lack of any local knowledge. This morning, I saw an article from Sussex Live promoting a place called Slindon, a village near Chichester with a large rural estate owned by the National Trust that you can explore (but which has literally no amenities at all — no cafe, car park nor toilet), but which according to Sussex Live offers “an area of peace and tranquility just a short drive from city life in Chichester”, as if Chichester was a bustling metropolis rather than a small town which is a ‘city’ in name only because it has a cathedral.

One subject I’ve been seeing in a lot of the clickbait is Manston airport, a former international airport with a runway long enough to take 747s which has been closed for years because it was unviable, a fact that should have been obvious to anyone who could read a map before they decided to open an international airport there. It’s right out on the eastern tip of Kent, 75 miles from London, surrounded only by villages and small towns including another of those small-town cathedral cities, Canterbury. There’s Ramsgate, a town with a seaport which also proved unviable and closed a number of years ago, and a seaside town called Margate with an amusement park which has its fans (it has been in and out of business under various names over the years, and while disused for a while, was used as a location for a concentration camp in a TV drama), but is still a longer trek to get to than Brighton if you’re coming from London and want a fast train journey and some actual scenery. However, the local media churnalists keep promoting articles telling us Manston could be opening up again any year now and could be a rival to the major London airports such as Gatwick and Stansted.

The truth is, it’s a rival to neither. It could not even compete with Lydd, an international airport on the south Kent coast, way out on the Dungeness marshes near the nuclear power station. That’s popular because it’s the last stop for small plane pilots who want to fly to France but need customs clearance which isn’t available at their local grass airfield (it has a counterpart on the French coast, Le Touquet). It’s used for training as well, but commercial flights stopped in 2018. Gatwick and Stansted both have ‘London’ in the name; Manston is almost as far from London as Swindon is, but in the wrong direction (Swindon is more than halfway to Bristol; Manston is halfway to the middle of the North Sea). Gatwick is barely 10 miles outside London on the south side, it has a good rail link into London with connections to trains running up country thanks to Thameslink and the station is next to the terminal building rather than the wrong side of the runway as is the case with the nearest station to Manston. It’s also convenient for every large town on the Sussex coast and everywhere in between, including a fair bit of Kent. Gatwick has been promoting itself as the ideal place for an extra runway, though it was passed over for Heathrow and even that seems to have foundered because the pandemic resulted in a huge decline in air travel and a number of airlines going bust. (It has the disadvantage of being 50 miles further than Heathrow for anyone coming down from places like Birmingham by road.)

Stansted is north-east of London in Essex. That makes it more than convenient for anyone in north London, the Home Counties and Essex — you don’t have to go across the Thames by the congested toll bridge and tunnel at Dartford — and thanks to improved road links, it’s more than convenient for East Anglia and the Midlands. Also north of the Thames is Luton, an airport with a large runway just off the M1 15 miles outside the M25 with a fast rail link to central London, the South Coast, and the East Midlands. Round the other side of London is, of course, Heathrow and if you can’t bear to ride the train to your AGM, City airport might just be the place to fly to. From most of these places, Manston is a longer trek than up to the Midlands, which also has two international airports of its own, along roads that don’t have tolls.

It has also been suggested that Manston could be used for cargo aircraft. These people have never worked in air cargo: you can’t operate a cargo airport with just a bit of tarmac. You need facilities to process and scan the cargo, with the equipment used to move and load the large pallets used in air cargo on and off trucks and planes (you have special logistics companies for air cargo, as everyone has to be security vetted and trained, and they need special trucks or trailers). You need bonded warehouses and customs facilities (even more so now we are outside the EU). Airports that handle a lot of cargo have huge areas dedicated to it; Heathrow’s is huge and was bursting at the seams before the Covid downturn. It’s a big investment.

And that’s before we even consider the cost to the environment of having more and more airports and more journeys being made by air. It’s an awful lot of carbon dioxide being pumped out high into the atmosphere, far above where any tree could get a whiff of it. We need to be scaling back air travel, not making more opportunities for it. But Manston is just a bad business proposition, a place far from anywhere that will never be viable as a civilian airport unless they decide to build a whole new big city in east Kent. It was built by the air force and should really have closed as soon as the RAF no longer needed it; eight years after it ran out of steam as a commercial airport, it should not be seriously considered for one again. And if the geographically illiterate writers at Reach newspapers don’t like that, someone should just show them where Manston is on a map.

Image source: James Stewart, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) licence, version 2.0.