Got to say that there is a serious amount of rubbish being talked about here with respect to diverting to another airport and avoiding built up areas.
On the basis of some of the contributions in this thread London's new airport will be built in the Outer Hebrides with a 16 hour bus transfer to the city.
Had the misfortune to have had far more than my fair share of jet engine failures over the years - the most difficult thing is finding out what the problem is and also the extent of it (the sitting on hands period) - in the meantime, there's a bit of aviating and navigating required and during this period you don't want to up the workload any more than you have to (thinking time) - turning up at a strange airfield who don't expect you whilst you try and find the charts sounds to me, in many cases, like bad airmanship.
The wonderful team at LHR ATC would have had their plan promulgated through LHR tower/app/ground and emerg services within a minute or two of the Airbus rotation and apparent problems.
Going back to understanding what you're problem is and gathering the information to take action - if you've never had a major emergency/failure with an EICAS or ECAM you're in for a shock - 20-40 warnings on the display constantly changing as the priority system keeps changing their order and, of course, what you don't get from reading the cockpit voice recorder transcript - the noise !! The funny thing is, you can have 20-40 warnings and you still don't know what the problem/cause is - the warnings displayed are, in most cases, just the symptoms !
If the guys had panels ripping off I'm sure that much of the information presented to the pilots would have been suspect due to the condition of the sensors.
Great job BA and LHR ATC.