Heathrow Airport: The Northern Perimeter Zone

The Northern Perimeter Zone lies between the North Perimeter Road and the Bath Road. This area caters for the airport’s administration buildings and the vast expanses of car parking. 62% of Heathrow’s NPZ is designated for motor vehicle space.

These parking areas lie quietly bare, giving the strip the appearance of a windy and cold wilderness. They are as much a place as non-place but largely inaccessible to the pedestrian.

The surrounding landscape is being steadily consumed with countless, featureless, two-storey office buildings. These isolated buildings, typical of the modern city’s periphery, have not given way to hybrid structures with diverse programmes, and trivial matter is continuing to sprawl.

These zones are the ideal location for realising new programmes. These are the last open spaces within urban agglomerations, and their position between city centre and rural landscape guarantees easy accessibility to the general public. In most European cities the recent transformation of peripheral motorway zones into urban centres for mass culture is a familiar notion to many.

The NPZ offers centrality, easy access and vast open areas - attractive site specifications for the situation of any large-scale, multi-cultural event. This reserve of Arcadian idylls is, for the metropolis, a means of letting of steam by temporarily escaping into a self-imposed primitivism.

This North Perimeter Zone demands new in(ter)ventions to satisfy both its requirements and its locality. The exceptional characteristics of the airport itself offer the direction.

Extract from Alex Cochrane’s “Space Event”. Published in Breathing Cities by Burkhauster.