Terminal: that is the outlook for the building that proved the original concept for the modern airport. The revolutionary design of The Beehive, as Gatwick’s 1936 circular terminal soon became known, provided a sleek, beautiful interface between two forms of transport - rail and air.
For those unlucky enough to be reading this in one of the UK’s many dreary terminals for trains, boats, planes and buses, you can now drool over the world’s 10 best.
St Pancras International, London
The most absurd feature of the triumphant re-opening of Britain’s finest railway station was the claim that it possesses the longest champagne bar in Europe: a banal irrelevance compared with the grand scale of the historic Barlow Shed.
The �800-million resurrection of the north London station as the start and end of Britain’s only high-speed line has been carried out with due reverence to the Victorian rail engineers.
The sense of space created by the soaring span lifts the eye, and the spirits, heavenwards. The harmonious glass and steel curves and stout brickwork provide inspirational punctuation for your journey - even if your final destination is Loughborough, from the annexe in the north-west corner for East Midlands Trains.
Departures, though, are more uplifting than arrivals: passengers coming to London on the Eurostar from Paris and Brussels are funnelled far too quickly into a subterranean labyrinth which eventually ejects the visitor onto a six-lane trunk road with the only brightness in the field of vision being a Burger King.
Changi airport, Singapore
Perhaps, you may reflect as the sun shimmers on the ripples left by your wake, long-haul air travel isn’t that bad after all. The open-air swimming pool, complete with poolside bar, is the icing on the cake for an airport that has a simple concept. Approximately, it seems to go like this: you’re probably only halfway through a long and arduous journey; you want to get out of here as quickly as possible, but are constrained by factors beyond your control such as airline schedules and unforeseen delays; so we’re going to make it as bearable as possible.
Free Internet access? Help yourself. Hungry? Eat your way around the world from Sudan to Japan. Desperate for a touch of nature in the sterile world of international aviation? Try the indoor sunflower garden, or the cactus garden on the roof of Terminal 1, which is also where you’ll find the pool. Keep three things in your hand baggage when take a connecting flight to Singapore: passport, camera and swimming gear.
And if you have a long connection (four hours or more), seek out the free city-tour that gives you a glimpse of cosmopolitan Singapore, including a boat-trip on the river.
Zaragoza bus terminal, Spain
Las Delicias is the name for the terrestrial transportation hub in the city that hosts this year’s Expo. It translates as “the delights” - not a term usually associated with a bus terminal. Previously, coaches squeezed into cramped stations around the city; Las Delicias concentrates them all in a home where buses cohabit with high-speed trains; this is the halfway point on the new AVE railway line between Madrid and Barcelona.
Spain does bus terminals with a flourish; Madrid’s are frantic yet functional, Seville’s mimics the scale of the city’s vast cathedral, and Cartagena’s takes its stimulus from the wheel itself. Zaragoza’s dazzling concrete and glass structure is very different. It bestows the sense of wandering into a crystal; planes (in the geometric, not aeronautical, sense) meeting at acute angles, and which give an intuitive sense of purpose to the passenger’s progress from street to stand. Buses glide in from Madrid and Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia, and set out again to speed across the sun-bleached lands of Aragon.
You can see more of Las Delicias in The Independent’s online video, ‘48 Hours in Zaragoza’, which is available at www.independent.co.uk/spain
Victoria Terminus, Mumbai
In the continuing Hindu-isation of names, this pinnacle of Indian railway architecture has recently changed its official name to Chhatrapati Shivaji - the same as the city’s airport. Confused? You’re in Bombay. Or is it Mumbai?
Indian Railways is the world’s biggest transport undertaking, and Victoria Terminus is where many of the billions of journeys taken each year begin. It owes an architectural debt to St Pancras in London. Yet the fa�ade of trills and frills is uniquely Indian. “Possibly the most ornate Gothic frontage in the world,” say The Men Who Know - the compilers of the Thomas Cook Overseas Timetable.
Circular Quay, Sydney
Half correct; the hub for the ferry services that slice serenely across Sydney Harbour is definitely a quay. But there is barely a curve to be seen; the yellow-and-green vessels moor squarely against jetties poking perpendicularly from a flat concrete quayside.
Location is the key to this quay. The Circular Quay in Australia’s biggest city is pinioned by two of the world’s great tourist icons, the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Indeed, the best way to view them is from the deck of a ferry. Take a trip to Balmain and you will sail beneath the bridge, where its muscular foundations are evident. Or, en route to see some masculine surfers, cruise past the Opera House en route to the beautiful Pacific beach at Manly.
Terminal 5, Heathrow
The world’s most expensive air terminal will have an unfortunate effect on its predecessors at Europe’s busiest airport when it opens to the travelling public on Thursday 27 March. Terminal 5’s clean simplicity and soaring scale is such a contrast to the existing facilities, it will destroy what remains of their fragile self-esteem.
If you are among the lucky minority of passengers who find themselves arriving, departing or changing planes at Terminal 5, the experience should be serene; you should “make it from check-in, via fast bag-drop and through security in around 10 minutes”, says British Airways, the terminal’s only airline. Then you are free to enjoy a building that BA’s chief executive, Willie Walsh, calls: “An extremely sophisticated baggage system with a terminal built around it.”
Whatever this says about BA’s priorities, his new terminal shows how the commodities of space and reason, when applied to a completely new structure, can remove much of the unnecessary clutter from the process of travelling. Be warned, though: turn up at security less than 35 minutes before departure and you are off the plane.
Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, Germany
“This monolithic building could hold several cathedrals”, assert The Men Who Know - the compilers of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable. Sixty-seven minutes after leaving the German capital, you arrive at Leipzig’s temple to the train. It is the pick of the Continental crop mainly for its sheer scale - its fa�ade is the length of two championship-sized football pitches.
Within its elegant columns there is space for 150 shops and more besides, such as an ice rink in winter. The terminus - which was completed a year into the First World War - provides a proper portal for the city. The only problem is that, after leaving the station, the rest of Leipzig looks a trifle drab.
Amsterdam Schiphol Airport
There’s an art to a good terminal building. Or, in Amsterdam Schiphol Airport’s case, there’s some art in a good terminal building. The city’s main Rijksmuseum may have been under repair since 2003, but for the past six years a small outpost has operated - with free entry from 7am to 8pm daily - at the airport itself, bringing a welcome dose of art and culture to disorientated, dishevelled travellers.
Not that there’s any need to be disorientated in Schiphol: this vast airport (46 million passengers processed in 2006) may vie with Heathrow, Frankfurt and Charles de Gaulle as one of Europe’s main travel hubs, but it does so with elegant simplicity, rather than claustrophobia and panic.
Three departure halls and six runways are united in one airy terminal building - designed in a distorted semi-circle - which means there’s a fair amount of gliding along on conveyor belts to be done if you have to switch flights, but absolutely no lengthy transfers using groaning monorails or grubby buses. And as for being dishevelled, well, the shopping opportunities at Schiphol are legion: everything from Antwerp diamonds to clogs.
Even true love can be found at Schiphol: since 2006, marriage ceremonies have been conducted here (www.schipholweddings.nl), with couples leaving for their honeymoon aboard the next available flight.
Marseilles Provence 2, France
You could buy at least 200 copies of “MP2″, as this breathtakingly simple terminal is styled, for the price of one Heathrow Terminal 5.
MP2 is what happens when designers start with a blank piece of paper and devise an airport terminal that includes everything you need and nothing that you don’t: a few check-in desks, though these days many travellers will have already printed out their boarding pass at home; a central point for depositing baggage, rather than a complex series of conveyor belts; a caf� that serves adequate food and decent coffee at reasonable prices; and concrete corridors leading to the apron and the waiting plane.
Form scrupulously follows function, and by removing any pretence that you are there to have a good time MP2 manages to feel remarkably cheerful. Or maybe it’s because you’ve just been in the South of France.
Easter Island airport
This weekend, a few hundred fortunate folk will be flying in from Tahiti or Santiago de Chile to the world’s most isolated airport. If their luck holds, no fog will cloud the final approach of the LAN Boeing 767 - otherwise they face a scarcely credible five-hour onward flight to the nearest diversion airport.
All being well, which over Easter weekend it certainly should be, they will touch down at what is arguably the simplest international airport in the world. The terminal is a small shed with a caf� attached, which is where transit passengers can sip cafe con leche while they bemoan their short stay on this fascinating island.
But because the terminal is on the edge of the onlysignificant settlement on the island, transit passengers can easily stretch their legs down to the harbour and along the shore to marvel at the mysterious stone heads that populate the island whose isolation is so splendid.
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