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Poster for London Airport (1949)

London Airport (1949)

1949 · Short film · 9 min

  • Documentary
Watch now On the Internet Archive

Synopsis

In April 1944 The Great Western Aerodrome started its transformation from a privately owned small grass airfield to Heathrow; by 1946 one of the world’s busiest airports. Requisitioned by the Air Ministry in 1944, the site was officially earmarked as a major transport base for the Royal Air Force (RAF), which would at the end of the war evolve into London’s main civil airport replacing Croydon Airport. However it has been suggested that the official proposal as an RAF base was merely a ruse to…

Synopsis from TMDb

Details

Studio
Central Office of Information for Ministry of Civil Aviation
Released
1949-01-01
Running time
9 minutes

Reviews on the Internet Archive

★★★ · Looked different in those days · movieman · 2005-11-27

Having been through Heathrow numerous times, it was odd to see how it looked a few decades ago: about the only similarity is the runway arrangement (and the runways back then looked pretty scary compared to the ones they have today!). I never realised it was built on farmland, today it's so built-up that it's hard to imagine being any different.

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