First look at Heathrow's £2.5bn Terminal 2

 
High-flier: the new Terminal 2 at Heathrow, which will have a John Lewis branch and a Heston Blumenthal restaurant, and will eventually be used by 26 airlines
Lucy Tobin6 March 2014

This is the world’s first look at Heathrow’s new £2.5 billion Terminal 2 – the result of five years’ building work on Europe’s biggest construction site.

When the terminal originally opened in 1955, with the red tape cut by the Queen when she was just 29, check-in took place in large tents with wooden floors. A dining table at the back hosted stacks of newspapers under a banner bearing the name ‘WH Smith.’

Now the new 40,000 square metre Terminal 2 - Queen’s Terminal is almost four times the size of Buckingham Palace, with a steel-framed roof made up of waves, 45 shops and 17 restaurants .

But Heathrow bosses say they have learnt from the mistakes of Terminal 5’s disastrous opening in 2008, when hundreds of flights were cancelled, tens of thousands of bags went missing and hundreds of thousands of passengers faced delays or cancellations.

“Terminal Five opened with a big bang and tried to deal with 1700 passengers on its first day and 17 million fliers in its first six months,” Max Vialou-Clark, Heathrow’s Retail Director, told the Standard. “But this will be a much slower ramp up, we are prepared.”

He added that the new terminal is “more British than any other”. Despite being designed by Spanish architect Luis Vidal, 40% of Terminal Two’s shops and restaurants are homegrown. They include John Lewis’s first airport branch - which is a tenth of the size of its smallest existing store - branches of Burberry, Mulberry, Cath Kidston and Ted Baker, and Heston Blumenthal’s first airport restaurant.

Heathrow Terminal 2: in pictures

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For that, the celebrity chef is bringing canisters of liquid nitrogen through Heathrow’s security regime to make ice cream for pre-flight passengers.

Blumenthal’s restaurant is also offering pizzas cooked in 60 seconds via the first ever wood-fired oven at an airport: everything else at the hub is powered by electricity for safety reasons.

When the terminal opens to passengers on 4 June 2014, with a United Airlines flight from Chicago scheduled to land in the early morning, it will also host carriers including Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, US Airways, Aer Lingus, and Virgin Atlantic Little Red.

It is to be staffed by 24,000 people from 160 different companies, including some 600 security officers stationed along the airside boundary. The original Terminal 2 was built to handle 1.2 million passengers.

By the time it was demolished in 2009, 8 million passengers a year were travelling through its arrival and departure halls. Now the foreign owners of Heathrow, a foreign consortium led by Spain’s Ferrovial, expect 20 million annual passengers to use Terminal 2.

It will have 178 flights a day once it is fully operational, and 55,000 passengers per day, but airlines are moving in gradually, with 17 United Airlines flights on the first day.

New features at the terminal include free personal shopping sessions, and free pre-flight Jo Malone and Crème de la Mer massages and facials.

Londoners who dislike plane food will also be glad to know each of the terminal’s 17 restaurants will offer “mile high meals”, where fliers can order take-away to take their food on-board. Yo Sushi is allowing passengers to order meals from security to pick up on their way to board their flight. The terminal is also serving a new “Heathrow beer”, London’s Pride by Fuller’s.

Later this year, Terminal One will close for rebuilding works. Eventually it will link up to the new terminal to create a take-off and landing building the size of Terminal Five - which is Britain’s biggest building.

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