Incredible.
Over in London there are people fighting to avoid an airfield being built on top of their houses, and in Filton it's the other way around.
Why don't they just all exchange homes?
A considerable number of residents who live in the vicinity of Filton Airfield have
not taken altruism as their credo. When the Bristol Airport runway was closed at night for resurfacing in the winter of 2006/2007 the two nightly mail rotations then operating from BRS were switched to Filton. The complaints about noise that this brought to the local press made one think that a major airport was operating 24 hours a day.
When Bae applied to turn Filton into a city airport in the 1990s the local opposition was such that a public enquiry was held that led to the application being refused.
There are those who argue that Filton should have become Bristol's airport in the 1950s when Bristol Corporation as the city council was then known closed their Whitchurch airport and bought the former RAF Lulsgate Bottom site on a wind-swept and mist-laden plateau south of the city.
Popular belief has it that the Bristol Aeroplane Company the then owners and occupiers of Filton offered their facility to the council for a peppercorn rent. Mindful that they would be tenants and perhaps secondary to the requirements of the resident owners the council opted to purchase Lulsgate.
Filton certainly has many things that Lulsgate lacks: a longer runway; a larger site (though not so large as it once was since part has already been sold for housing); two major motorways intersecting a few minutes away (M4 and M5); a main line railway line passing nearby (from both London and Bristol to South Wales) and a branch line running through the site itself from Fiton to Avonmouth; overall better weather conditions; close to the North Bristol fringe, a major driver of the Bristol region economy.
Whether a Filton-sited Bristol airport would have really flourished since the 1950s is arguable given that it would have been subject to the whims of the BAC and its successors.
It would now be up against a large body of nimby and environmental objectors given its proximity to a large urban area; Lulsgate suffers in this respect yet its neighbours are villagers and people living around and strolling the nearby woods, fields and combes.