I happen to agree that the spread of London prefixed airport names is “faintly ridiculous”. But then LCY’s CCO is making himself “faintly ridiculous” by whingeing about it in public.
I have a much better idea. Look back to the 1950s before all this nonsense started. Then there was only one London Airport, the place we now know as Heathrow. All the other airports serving the London area would never have dreamed of calling themselves London-Croydon, -Gatwick, -Blackbushe, -Northolt,-Bovingdon etc. It was the reopening of Gatwick which was designated by the government as London’s second airport that started the rot, so we had to have London Heathrow and London Gatwick.
But the hard fact is that LHR was then and is now London’s pre-eminent airport, the one that most deserves to be use the title of London. For this reason my proposal is that Heathrow should revert to its old name of London Airport, and all the other pretenders should drop “London” and revert to their local geographical title, hence plain Gatwick, Stansted,Luton, Southend. And LCY ? It should revert to “Docklands” which was its original title before its owners renamed it.
