Why Does London Have Six Airports?

Most big cities have one main airport, maybe two. London has six: Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, London City and Southend. Together they handled more than 177 million passengers in 2024, more than any other city’s airports.

Nobody sat down and designed that. London’s airport system is the result of about 70 years of plans that were drawn up, argued over and abandoned, while passenger numbers kept growing anyway. Each time the main airport filled up, the overflow went somewhere else, and that somewhere else slowly became an airport with its own identity.

The first overflow: Gatwick

Heathrow opened for civil flights in 1946, on the site of a wartime airfield west of London. It grew fast. By the early 1950s the government had already decided London needed a second airport, and in 1952 it picked Gatwick, a small pre-war aerodrome south of the city in Sussex.

When the Queen opened the rebuilt Gatwick in June 1958, it did something new: it put a mainline railway station, a trunk road and the terminal together under one roof. It was one of the first airports anywhere to be designed around rail access from the start. That idea is exactly what Montreal’s Mirabel would lack two decades later.

The third-airport saga

By the late 1960s, even two airports weren’t going to be enough. The government set up the Roskill Commission, a formal inquiry that sat from 1968 to 1970 to find the best site for a third London airport. It recommended Cublington, in rural Buckinghamshire. There was a huge local outcry, and the government rejected the choice.

Instead, ministers backed an idea from one dissenting commission member: build a brand-new airport on reclaimed land at Maplin Sands, off the Essex coast in the Thames Estuary. Aircraft would approach over the sea, away from homes. It was ambitious and expensive, and in 1974 the new government cancelled it during an economic crisis.

London ended up with the least dramatic option. In 1979 the government chose to develop Stansted, an existing airfield in Essex that hadn’t even been on Roskill’s shortlist. Its Norman Foster-designed terminal, with its famous lightweight roof, opened in 1991.

How low-cost airlines filled the gaps

For years Stansted and Luton were quiet. Then the rules changed. As Europe opened up its aviation market in the 1990s, new low-cost airlines needed cheap airports with space to grow, and they found them on London’s edges. On 10 November 1995 easyJet flew its first flight, from Luton to Glasgow. Ryanair built Stansted into its largest base; in 2024 Stansted handled a record 29.8 million passengers.

This is the point-to-point model in action. A low-cost airline doesn’t need Heathrow’s connecting passengers. It needs quick turnarounds and low airport charges, and a slightly longer train ride is a price its customers will pay for a cheaper ticket.

The odd one out: London City

London City Airport came from a completely different direction. In the early 1980s the old Docklands were being redeveloped as a financial district. The construction company Mowlem and a small airline, Brymon Airways, proposed a short runway right there, on the quay between two old docks, for business travellers. It opened in 1987.

Because the tall towers of Canary Wharf sit just next to the approach path, aircraft have to descend at 5.5 degrees instead of the usual 3. Only aircraft specially certified for that steep approach can use it, which keeps the airport small and mostly limited to regional jets. It handled about 3.6 million passengers in 2024. What it sells is time: from its terminal to a bank office in the City can be a short ride on the Docklands Light Railway.

Why there’s no single mega-airport

Other cities facing the same growth chose one giant hub. Beijing built Daxing in under five years. London kept trying to do the same thing, from Maplin in the 1970s to the “Boris Island” estuary idea considered in the 2010s, and every time the cost and the politics won.

The result is a system where each airport has its own job:

• Heathrow: the long-haul hub, home to British Airways, packed to its legal flight cap. Its third runway is still years away.
• Gatwick: a mix of leisure, low-cost and some long-haul, all squeezed onto one runway. It won approval in 2025 to use its standby runway too.
• Stansted and Luton: low-cost bases for Ryanair, easyJet and Wizz Air.
• London City: short-haul business flights close to the financial district.
• Southend: the smallest, with about 288,000 passengers in 2024.

It’s untidy, and it’s confusing for visitors who book a “London” flight and land 60km away. But it works better than the history suggests. Because each airport specialises, London offers almost every kind of flight somewhere. The price is a sprawling system that no one would design from scratch.

Sources & Further Reading

• Airports of London — Wikipedia ↗
• Why Does London Have Six Airports? — AeroCorner ↗
• Roskill Commission — Wikipedia ↗
• Maplin: the Treasury and London’s third airport in the 1970s — History & Policy ↗
• London Gatwick Reopens As The World’s First Multimodal Airport — Simple Flying ↗
• Stansted Airport — Foster + Partners ↗
• The Steep Approach Rules at London City Airport — Simple Flying ↗