"It is surprising what you can do with a very light aircraft..."
Some may remember the single engine entire display of the lovely looking Airspeed Ambassador over sixty years ago at the Farnborough SBAC show.
The design for Heathrow, then, had three sets of parallel runways with three different QDMs. (Potentially that might have meant 12 different ILS approach paths.)
Possibly someone saw that the potential power of a nose wheel would allow the better control of an aircraft in a crosswind. So Heathrow has, at the moment, TWO runways.
Would this have been " an unexpected consequence..." ?