This morning at 4.28 I was, as is frequently the case, woken by the first lumbering large Boeing or Airbus coming in from the Far East to land at Heathrow. The siting of an airport to the West of the City it serves when the prevailing wind is from the South West was a very dim idea indeed. But, as Heathrow dates back to the pre-jet era, nobody thought about this and the resulting sleep-disturbance it causes to millions is no laughing matter. Equally unamusing are the appalling levels of air pollution that exist at Heathrow.

Even if it was in the correct place, Heathrow is full. It operates at 98% capacity which means, as occurred last Winter, when we get a bit of snow all hell breaks lose and we become the air transport laughing stock of Europe. Gatwick has only one runway and is not a proper business airport. Stansted is a Ryanair ghetto miles from London with the slowest and most useless train link outside Afghanistan . Luton… Well, don’t get me started.

So we require a new airport and the Thames estuary is clearly the place for it.  The announcement this morning that the government is willing to do some research to consider it as a possibility is a good start. But there is a long long way to go. Where to stick a new alternative to Heathrow is an argument that has been going on for decades and I’m old enough to recall the fight against it being placed on Maplin Sands, an earlier version of Boris Island. It was the twitchers who were in the vanguard of the protest movement against that idea, as they will be this time round.

The infrastructure necessary to bring hundreds of thousands of passengers into central London each day from the estuary will be very expensive indeed. But building it will be a great economic stimulus and create huge numbers of jobs. By contrast if  we don’t do something fast we are in grave danger of being left behind as rivals in Holland and Germany eagerly suck air passenger traffic away from us. A recent GLA report shows that airline passenger demand is forecast to increase from 140 million to 400 million by 2050. We cannot just sit there and watch as everything clogs up to the point of standstill.

We’re supposed to be an outward-facing trading nation. Stuff doesn’t arrive on ships any more. People arrive on planes and gliding down to touch a runway in the Thames, our most ancient commercial waterway, is very apt.