The Orchard
"We're re-introducing Cox apple trees to this village and building a bridge between the past and the future, because this community will have a future. BAA and the government now know that if they try to build this new runway they will have to dig up trees owned by and on behalf of millions of people from every area of British society."
- Alison Steadman
With the help of people like actress Alison Steadman, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and former Heathrow writer-in-residence Alain de Botton, we're planting yet more roots into the land we own on behalf of tens of thousands of people around the world in the shape of an apple orchard. A right spanner in the works for advocates of bigger airports at Heathrow and elsewhere.
The field in Sipson was crowded: Alison and Carol Ann rubbing shoulders with Richard Briers, returning after helping us set up the allotment earlier in the year, and politicians of all hues. Trees have been adopted by various groups who oppose plans for a third runway, including Labour and Conservative MPs (David Cameron and Oliver Letwin have lent their names to the Tory one), while the Lib Dem and Green parties have trees of their own. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg was there to reaffirm his party's stand against a bigger Heathrow and local Labour MP John McDonnell was also on hand for some tree-planting duties.
Thirteen trees in all have been planted and dedicated, including one for all you 57,000-plus Airplotters out there, as well as the massive coalition of scientists, local councils, celebrities, and campaigning groups (including fellow apple enthusiasts the Woodland Trust) who think we need to rein in our binge-flying. One has also been accepted by Reverend Tafue of Tuvalu, the Pacific nation which is already feeling the effects of climate change.
Alain de Botton couldn't attend the tree planting in person but a plaque bearing his name does stand in front of a Langley pippin tree. During his week-long stint as Heathrow's writer-in-residence earlier this year, he documented life in the various terminals and although he says that "I love airports and air travel", he also recognises that "if our society is to tolerate them, we're going to have to learn to fly a lot less."
Meanwhile, Carol Ann Duffy has predicted the demise of the third runway in her poem Mrs Scrooge as the Ghost of Christmas Past visits the orchards of Sipson. You can read it on the Guardian website.
Yet the orchard is more than just a physical block to the third runway plans, it's also firmly rooted (if you'll pardon the pun) in the history of the Heathrow area. In the mid-1800s, Richard Cox bred the Cox's orange pippin just a mile away from the current airport and he's buried in the graveyard in Harmondsworth, one of the villages under threat from the runway plans. His legacy is seen in supermarkets around the country, as the Cox's orange pippin accounts for more than half of all UK-grown dessert apples.
The Heathrow area was also, until relatively recently, an important source of food for London. Until the 1960s, market gardens proliferated and produce was sent in to the old Covent Garden market for sale to city-dwellers.