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T5 - BLIGHTING COMMUNITIES, BULLDOZING COUNTRYSIDE
T5 and the roads planned to serve it will mean further property blight and the loss of farmland, valuable open spaces and London's precious Green Belt.
Apart from wanting to destroy the valuable Perry Oaks site, BAA wants to link T5 to the M25 by a 4-lane embanked spur road, cutting across the Colne Valley. BAA also proposes to widen the M4 close to Heathrow. T5 would concrete over 600 acres of London's Green Belt with roads, taxi-ways, shops, satellite buildings, hangars, aircraft stands, car parks, a fuel store, offices, service areas and an 600 room hotel. In other words, T5 would be the largest structure ever built in the supposedly protected Green Belt.
Perry Oaks and the adjacent farm both pre-date the airport. They cover 550 acres of Green Belt and are part of the Colne Valley Regional Park, a Site of Metropolitan Importance. This is where T5 would be built. BAA wants to move the sludge works which currently occupies Perry Oaks elsewhere, but this would also be in the Green Belt and destroy more wildlife and habitats.
“Perry Oaks is a blight on the environment ” Sir Colin Marshall, chairman of British Airways and now a member of various government committees.
BAA and BA like to dismiss Perry Oaks as being a worthless sludge works so that its loss might not seem important. In fact, Perry Oaks is one of the most important sites in the London area for wildfowl and waders. Because most of the once-marshy and shallow-water regions in the Thames Valley have been drained, this sort of habitat is increasingly rare and can offer a lifeline to migrating birds and other wildlife. And because so many other valuable sites have been lost or are also under threat, Perry Oaks is exactly the kind of habitat we need to preserve.
Heathrow sits in the Thames floodplain, with the Colne Valley Regional Park on its western flank. The area provides diverse habitats and a green corridor for wildlife, as well as natural places for people to enjoy and a `green lung' in an area dominated by roads and the airport.
Apart from the River Colne itself, several small rivers and tributaries of the Thames flow through the area. The Colne Valley would be severed at its narrowest part by the M25 spur road. The embanked 4-lane road and "landscaping" would destroy meadows next to the River Colne.
During the Public Inquiry, BAA's ‘expert’
presented evidence on the areas
threatened
by its proposal but failed to find what local community volunteers found
- Water Avens (the rarest plant
in SE England) and Cowlips (also rare in the region). These findings alone
demonstrate BAA's inability to tell us the truth about after our environment,
let alone look after it. They make a nonsence of its case that the area is of
little ecological value.
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