You’d think the interior of Manston Airport’s long-closed departure terminal is stuck in the past, a memorial to the day the airport closed eight years ago.
Because when you first enter you will see a 1980s model of Margate Hospital reception. The sign above the nearest door reads “Ward 1″. Embarrassed? This is clear.
But it becomes clearer when you realize that earlier this year, the derelict building was used as part of director Sam Mendes’ film Empire of the Light, directed by Olivia Coe Mann et al. Located in the 1980s, it doubles as an emergency room reception desk.
Since then, the site has been in the midst of a relentless legal battle between its owner RiverOak Strategic Partners (RSP) and local adversaries seeking to turn it into a multi-million dollar shipping hub.
With the government’s recent approval to reopen (again), it now faces another possible judicial review that will at least once again delay certainty about its future.
However, although it has been at the center of a political whirlwind for many years – parties in the Thane District Council are elected and rejected based on their views in the seat, while local opinion is evenly divided – the airport itself has stalled. You could say on the ground.
We visited the site on a clear, cold October afternoon, exploring a rare opportunity with RSP director Tony Floydman, the airport’s general manager and the site’s sole remaining direct employee, Gary Black.
This is the most visible building from the road – once the name of the airport was printed on its outside. Today it is just an unremarkable white building.
Many in the area will find out when they head to the parking lot where Covid tests have been conducted for months during the pandemic.
The red carpet departure lounge, once filled with the excited chatter of passengers, is now filled only with the soft cooing of the doves that inhabit the rooftop space.
The tiles and insulation were crumbling and the crew was asked to leave the reception area, which looks so realistic you can’t see the wooden poles behind it until you walk past it as it “makes the place look bigger than it actually is.” “. this is good”.
The last time I was here was in 2013 when KLM launched a daily flight to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Hope is in the air and the place is buzzing. It’s empty today, and not to mention it’s pretty sad. There was something bleak about this place, which once had an industry but had long since fallen into disrepair.
As Gary Blake explains, “The passenger terminal has a lifespan of only 25 years, so no investment has been made. It’s always just an emergency repair of what needs to be repaired.”
This is one of the few remaining fixtures and accessories. The most remarkable thing is that when visiting the entire site, each building was stripped of almost everything.
When Ann Gloag bought the airport from previous owner Infrantil for £1 in December 2013, she promised to let low-cost carriers operate from it. Within six months, all employees were fired and closed.
She then auctioned off all the equipment at the airport. The result was only a ghostly shadow on the floor of one of the rooms where the luggage carousel once stood. Where there used to be a safe place for all checked baggage, the car has long been shipped to its new home.
Passing through the territory – tenants are still working on the land, one of them is a helicopter seller – we parked in a hangar. What remains are the outlines of the giant refrigeration units that once stood, used to store goods that were airlifted to the airport.
In a room outside of one of the buildings, horses are imported. Gary told me that they delivered “millions of pounds worth of racehorses” to Manston. Two stables still exist, the others have been demolished.
Next to them is a set of boxes labeled with materials used in the films “Empire of Light”, which still bear the code name “Lumiere”. The producers created the sets in these vast rooms.
We raced down the runway, letting the seagulls enjoy the heat on the airfield, and scattered in our wake. When the car we were in accelerates, you feel like you have to lift yourself up.
Instead, I got bursts of urban mythology. I’m sure there’s no contaminated land around him. Apparently, its previous short-lived owner, Stone Hill Park, who planned to turn it into housing, surveyed the soil and found it clean.
This is useful because there appears to be an aquifer underground that supplies 70% of Thanet with tap water.
Thousands of trucks are parked here in late 2020 and early 2021 to ease the chaos in Dover. The perfect storm for France to close its borders amid Covid-19 fears and new rules brought on by Brexit.
Clearly marked truck lines still cross the airport runway. Elsewhere, gravel was widely spread to provide stronger support for heavy vehicles that were forced to stop here before being released to enter Dover on the A256.
The next stop is the old control tower. The room downstairs where the server system was located had been cleared out, leaving only a few discarded cables.
A room where once a radar screen displayed a dizzying array of information from the planes in the sky around us, once again only outlines on the floor are left where the table once stood.
We climbed the – a bit wobbly – metal spiral staircase to the main control room, disturbing the spiders that covered it in webs.
From here you have unrivaled views of the coast, along Pegwell Bay, across Deal and Sandwich until you see the Dover Ferry Terminal. “On a clear day you can see France,” Gary said. He added that when it snows, “when viewed from here, it looks like a black and white photograph.”
Everything valuable in the table itself was torn off and sold. Only a few old-fashioned corded phones are left next to buttons that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the control panel of the original Death Star, and the international destination stickers that this airport once poked into the sky.
Opinions may be divided, but it is undeniable that Manston Airport has a card that, if played correctly, will surpass any opposition. It offers the perspective of an industry in an age where there is little else.
The RSP has pledged to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in the site to turn it into a cargo hub. Passenger flights would be welcome if and only if this approach works.
He believes the scale of the investment will allow him to prosper if other attempts fail.
In fact, it’s worth noting that although the airport was considered bankrupt for decades, the airport was only fully privatized – until 1999 it was owned by the Ministry of Defense (which in turn allowed some passenger flights) – 14 years before it suddenly closed eight years ago.
Gary Black explained: “The investment never came. We always had to mess around and make up for what we had as a military airfield to try and get into civilian business.
“I have been here since 1992 and no one has ever occupied or invested in this position to make it attractive for proper use.
“As we have moved over the years, from company to company, trying to make Manston successful, until now she has never had serious investment intentions to put the money in and make it what it should be.”
If he avoids any legal intervention, the future will be very different from what it has seen in the past – today’s site is littered with garbage.
So I asked Tony Freidman, director of strategic partnerships at RiverOak, why is his plan different from those that have tried and failed in recent years?
“We decided from the very beginning,” he explained, “that we can only solve this problem if we are going to seriously invest in infrastructure, and if we can find investors who are ready to do this. We have investors who have invested so far por., around £40 million, and once consent is finally given, everything will be at risk for other investors who want to follow suit.
“The total cost is £500-600m and for that you get an airport that can handle a potential 1m tons of cargo. In the context of the UK economy, this can play a big role.
“And Manston never had that kind of infrastructure. It had some basic infrastructure, some basic add-ons going back to RAF days, that’s all.
“Goods are where it’s a matter of life and death, and the industry understands that. But some locals don’t. They say if it didn’t work before, it won’t work again. Well, just 14 years after privatization, there’s little investment in this place.” He needs an opportunity.”
He was a bit shy when I asked the £500m question about who the investors he had set up were.
“They are private,” he explained. “They are represented by a private office in Zurich – all duly licensed and registered by the Swiss authorities – and they have British passports. That’s all I can tell you.
“They supported him for six years and despite some resistance and delays, they still support him.
“But as soon as we start investing heavily in infrastructure, long-term infrastructure investors will appear. An investor with £60m will of course look to external sources of funding when he needs to spend £600m.”
According to his ambitious plans, almost all the buildings on the site will be demolished and it will become a “blank canvas” on which he hopes to build a thriving cargo hub. By its fifth year of operation, it should create over 2,000 jobs on the site itself and thousands more indirectly.
If it works, it could provide jobs and aspirations for thousands of East Kent residents, which in turn could inject money into Thanet’s local economy, which is now almost entirely dependent on tourism to sustain it. .
I’ve been skeptical of its ambitions in the past – I’ve seen the site go down a few times – but you can’t help but think this place needs a more decent crack to achieve the success many hope for.
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Post time: Oct-26-2022