Careful urban planning and airport site selection

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 78.

“Do you know, incidentally, why Heathrow was built where it is? After the war the task of choosing a location for a new London airport was given to Alfred Critchley, a Canadian-born businessman who had made a fortune first by promoting greyhound racing and then by getting into cement in a big way, so to speak. He consolidated a whole bunch of small cement makers into the mighty enterprise known as Blue Circle and became hugely wealthy in the process. During the war, Critchley helped to set up training programmes for flyers, and because he knew a little about aviation and a great deal about the pouring of cement he was given the job after the war of deciding where to build a new airport to replace the old aerodrome at Croydon. I had always assumed that Heathrow was selected for some important practical reason – the porosity of the subsoil or depth of the water table or something – but in fact Critchley chose it because it was halfway between his house in Sunningdale and his office in London.

Flown in and out of Heathrow hundreds of times in my life. There is a small statue to World War II airmen which seems to move about over time. Based on that, I had always assumed Heathrow was an airfield during the war and that that was its origin. Indeed, it was an airfield but merely a supplementary field for emergency diversions and the like; not a major base.