Travelling from Luton airport is a teeth-grindingly laborious process compared with the grandeur of St Pancras International
If you're in any doubt that the class war is raging in the field of transport design, try travelling in the same week from London St Pancras International on the Eurostar, and then from Luton airport on a low-cost airline. Bear this contrast in mind when it is claimed ? and it often is, implicitly or otherwise, most obviously in the forthcoming budget's trailed inducements to air and road travel ? that holidays via air are the innocent privilege of the poor and the "squeezed middle", which green or lefty killjoys want to take away from them.
St Pancras International is marketed as "high design", combining the aesthetics of the industrial revolution ? in the form of William Barlow's majestic iron and glass canopy and George Gilbert Scott's grandiloquent hotel frontage ? along with the modern: sleek, grey-steel new terminuses, chic typography and, where beer barrels imported from the East Midlands once sat, a luxury shopping mall. Here, as you wait, you can fill yourself with all the organic coffee you can drink, stock up on improving literature in Foyles and enjoy the "world's longest champagne bar". Drink enough there and you might even find value in the station's statues of John Betjeman and snogging backpackers. To take a train into Europe is reserved for the elite, then, an elegant experience, "reassuringly expensive".
London Luton ? aside from the hubris in its very name, with a city of more than 200,000 demoted to a terminus for the capital ? also has a shopping mall, and also caters largely to travel in Europe, but that's where the similarity ends. The notion that the plane might be quicker and easier than the train is now absurd, if you're travelling from Luton or the many airports like it. To travel out of London from St Pancras is simple, even for non-Londoners, as the station is a major terminus. To travel to "London Luton" is teeth-grindingly laborious, on the disintegrating Thameslink train followed by a bus winding vaguely around the General Motors works. When you finally arrive at the airport, you're at a nasty little shed into which retail is stuffed as if at random. The design makes Lidl look like Le Corbusier, an overlit, cramped horror.
That's before you've even made your way into the floating cattle car that will be shepherding you to your destination, via your chosen low-cost airline ? in my case it's usually the Hungarian couriers to "new Europe" Wizzair, the subject of the Wizzair Sucks website. Then you'll arrive somewhere more humane, for a week or so. It's a miserable way to travel, for both of its main groups of clients ? Gastarbeiter from east-central Europe and working-class holidaymakers on their way to Spain. And never mind arriving at Luton, when accusatory signs about "ASYLUM" and the "UK BORDER" provide a warm welcome.
This experience, making the very act of getting in and out of the country a grim struggle, is what the government will trumpet as empowering the ordinary holidaymaker, while they themselves ? perhaps even the currently ascendant Clarkson tendency in the coalition, best represented by Philip Hammond ? would surely opt every time for the Eurostar. They are, in the fine tradition of British Conservatism, serving up something they know, as Gerald Ratner once so pithily put it, is "crap" ? then telling us we should be thankful.
So even before we bring in other factors ? the price and quantity of oil, or its hardly benign environmental effect ? it is clear that we are being sold a pup. The "freedom" of the skies or of the motorway is a risible myth.
Tony Cottee Taxonomy Sunderland Recession Aston villa Economic growth (GDP)
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