London does not want lose its status as a global hub international airport. The situation is torn between extending a third runway at Heathrow which has an estimated cost of about 11 billion pounds or the new proposal that advocates the study of Norman Foster, a new airport with four runways and capacity for future expansion with a cost of 15 billion pounds.

Foster + Partners office has submitted a detailed response to the Airports Commission’s call for evidence, addressing surface access, costs, delivery and an analysis of the environmental, economic and social impacts of a new airport on the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary.

Acording Foster + Partners its project will allow by creating a short connecting spur. The Isle of Grain can benefit from high-speed rail links to the rest of the UK and the new airport will be less than 26 minutes by train from St Pancras.

There is rising demand for new homes and jobs, in line with population growth – London is growing 20% in the next 20 years and the thrust of development is to the east. The new airport underpins this, and can balance the economies of east and west London, unlocking sites for housing. Heathrow can be transformed into a redevelopment site the size of an inner London borough, in anticipation of London’s inevitable further growth.

The Environment Agency is currently identifying and funding more than 800 hectares of new habitats for wildlife in the estuary, which are being displaced by rising sea levels – this is work that the Thames Hub can help to fund. Rather than spending £1bn to move the M25 to enable Heathrow’s expansion, this money could be better used to protect and replace habitats already under threat.

Norman Foster explains his proposal and ideas below: “Since the Airports Commission submission a year ago, the need for increased airport capacity has become even more urgent. Britain will need to plug-in to the network of major new hub airports being built and planned around the world, for example in Istanbul, Doha, Dubai, Beijing and Mexico City. If you cannot fly through London and connect to the destinations these new hubs offer, then trade will simply go elsewhere.

It is time to get serious about the issue of airport capacity. Britain needs an effective long-term solution, not the usual short-term fix that is Heathrow’s proposed third runway. Rather than boosting growth, expansion at Heathrow would have the opposite effect. The unacceptable levels of risk, noise and pollution would threaten London’s leading reputation as a world city." and Foster added, "In terms of connectivity alone, the Thames Hub would serve 191 long-haul destinations, compared to Heathrow’s 126.”

Read more about METALOCUS’s coverage of the original submission related to the process for approval here.

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Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

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