By all means praise MAG for what they’re doing but BAA built up STN even though there was enormous opposition to it. It was BAA who built a beautifuly simple and passenger friendly world class facility of which London could be justifiably proud. It was supposed to be the new Heathrow and they tried VERY hard for years. The harsh reality is that due to distance, a catchment area of too many sheep and fields and market dominance of LHR, it never worked. BAA realised it would never work and to be fair had to do something, and with AirUK’s hub concept struggling and KLM buying them out, they gave it to FR for next to nothing, they HAD to.
Hence none of the above concepts remain and STN is a loco shopping mall where the original concept is long neglected. But there would be no STN without BAA, that much is abundantly clear, although the days of the monopoly operator (now though to be very bad) or, coherent airport planning policy to put it another way (er, somehow less bad) are long gone. Both views have merit IMHO, a proper planning structure would have raised costs marginally but allowed less cut-price facilities. There is no way STN v2 will look as good as v1 as FR, LS et al couldn’t justify the price.
Good point about LCY, I have been wondering about Crossrail bringing LHR to the Wharf as well, LCY-JFK is barely hanging on as it is. SEN is not a London Airport to anyone but the marketing team at SEN. And that’s not meant as a slur on a good little airport, just a reality check on marketers, with whom I work with managing daily!!!