Noticed this in today's Daily Bellylaugh:
Manston Airport in Kent, which closed earlier this month, could become agarden city, its owner has said.
Ann Gloag, co-founder of the Stagecoach Group, bought the airport forjust £1 in October last year, but shut it on May 15 with the loss of 140 jobs,despite reportedly receiving a £5 million offer from a US firm.
The decision to reject the offer angered unions, but Ms Gloag told theTimes that talks were ongoing to secure the future of the site, with theconstruction of a garden city – including provision for thousands of homes – apossibility.
The proposal could incorporate other schemes in Thanet – one of the southern England’s least affluent regions – such as Discovery Park Kent, a business park in Sandwich.
Manston lost its final scheduled passenger flight – a KLM service to Amsterdam – in April, and had been running at a loss of £10,000 a day prior toits closure.
The site had been used by aircraft since the First World War, and RAF Manston was heavily bombed during the Battle of Britain. Barnes Wallis used thebase to test his bouncing bomb, used during the Dambusters raid.
In 1989 it was renamed Kent International Airport, and in the years that followed Dan-Air, Yugoslavian carrier Aviogenex, Aspro Holidays, Irish airline EUjet, Monarch, BMI and Flybe were among the firms to operate there.
Two museums, the RAF Manston History Museum and the Spitfire and Hurricane memorial, are located on the site, which also appeared as a North Korean airbase in the 2001 Bond film Die Another Day. It was also one of a handful of UK airports with a runway large enough to accommodate Concorde, as well as the A380 "superjumbo".
Just what Kent needs - a new garden city between the jewel of the East that is Ramsgate and historical Canterbury. I guess all those migrants, asylum seekers, fruit pickers, et al, need somewhere to live.
I thought that the two museums were outside the aerodrome boundary and independent of the aerodrome operations.
Mister B