In 1981 set against the backdrop of a royal wedding, riots in Liverpool and Brixton, IRA hunger strikes, and Bucks Fizz winning the Eurovision song contest the newly formed London Docklands Development Corporation (LDCC) started discussing the possibility of an airport in the Docklands area. The LDCC had been formed with the intention of redeveloping the Docklands area, as it had been in serious decline since the 1960s, but before that it was the largest and most successful ports complex in the world. Some of the decline was probably due to World War 2 and the ‘Blitz’ where much of the infrastructure was destroyed by bombing and even though they slowly recovered, a change to containerisation meant a slow decline. Previously goods were transported loose or bagged and required vast armies of stevedores to load and unload the ships but the spread of containerisation meant that goods travelled in standard sized boxes that can be loaded onto roll on/roll off ferries and could easily be transported by road. The huge armies of dockworkers weren’t needed and manufacturers no longer needed to be close to the ports and so moved to cheaper locations in the UK so they were less dependent on the London docks, leaving them with less trade, which meant unemployment in the area increased and the availability of skilled labour declined as workers moved away to find employment elsewhere.
The original idea was to encourage manufacturers and other industrial concerns back to the area, but because industry had already left its traditional areas in central London the LDCC didn’t have much success especially as they were competing with cheaper locations like Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Tyneside who were suffering the same industrial decline. One success was moving Billingsgate fish market from its old home in Billingsgate to Docklands, and it is still there today close to the main development.
Attracting industrial companies back to the area was largely unsuccessful but fortunately Docklands however is only a few miles away from the City of London and its proximity made it attractive as a secondary office location for many firms, especially as the amount of office space was finite in the city and the costs were steadily increasing and demand for new space was fuelled by the increase in financial service organisations. The 1980s also saw the advent of the ‘yuppie’, young cash rich professionals who wanted to live by the river.
In 1981 Royals Docks which would eventually be the site of London City Airport closed to commercial traffic.
By 1982 outline plans had already been submitted and to prove that the idea was feasible a Plymouth based airline that had already began to have some success using short take-off and landing planes (STOL) from a 1000m runway in Plymouth made a flight into Docklands. To allay the doubters a test flight was proposed and a site at Heron Quays was cleared and Mowlem laid a temporary runway surface on derelict land as it wasn’t possible to use the desired Royal Docks site. The CAA gave a special licence and the flight went ahead on June 27th just after 2pm with a de Havilland Canada Dash 7 flown by Captain Harry Gee for Brymon Airways. It was a success and proved that an airport was possible. Invitations were given to local residents who wanted to watch the landing but the plane flew a few times over the landing area earlier in the day so residents could judge the potential noise levels they would be dealing with if the airport became operational. The next day the flight was covered in the Times newspaper with the headline “Dashing into Docklands”. This historic flight is commemorated with a small plaque in Heron Quays DLR station, although no signs of the original temporary runway can be seen, and today the JP Morgan building stands on the site of the first temporary runway surface.
1983 brought a public enquiry and a second flight from Heron Quays. During the enquiry a further demonstration flight was requested by the inspector Montague Smith and his technical expert Air Marshal B.P. Young. The plane was again flown by Captain Harry Gee and these two people technically became the first passengers in a flight from Docklands on 30th June. Following the success of this flight an agreement is reached between the Mowlem and The Port of London authority to lease land for the airport in Royal Docks, not in the original location of the test flights.