We need Terminal Five

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They do these things differently in France. Today's announcement by Stephen Byers on a fifth terminal for Heathrow comes eight years after the British Airports Authority sought planning consent. For four years, an inspector sat in judgment. Every conceivable argument, pro and anti, was heard. The final report went to John Prescott, as Environment Secretary, almost a year ago. But Prescott passed the poisoned chalice to his Transport Ministry successor.

In France, there's not the same prejudice against ever doing anything. The chalice of change is welcomed.

That's why the French have their high-speed TGV trains, at stupendous public cost, while Britain - once the world's railway pioneer - still awaits them. The airport saga, a ferocious story of big-business rivalry, rubs the contrast home.

Last week, as Byers completed his dithering, French prime minister Lionel Jospin announced his government's unshakeable decision to build a third Paris airport at Chaulnes, on the edge of the First World War battlefields of the Somme. War graves will be dug up - mostly German, but a few British.

Locals protested that a thousand villagers would be uprooted and miles of good farmland handed over to the hotel-and-conference centre trade. Opponents marched through Paris. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission wrung its hands.

None of this counted. The brute facts of transportation and competition won. Chaulnes is already close to two motorways and a TGV line.

This isn't just an abstract question of comparative public administration. It shows what London's airports, and especially Heathrow, are up against in the real, competitive world. Forecasters all assume that the aftermath of 11 September will only be a blip on the chart of air travel growth. The French are unashamedly after Heathrow's business.

The great European rivals to Heathrow (and to Paris) are Amsterdam's Schiphol and Frankfurt. Both airports have already expanded. At Frankfurt, the traffic is growing proportionately faster than Heathrow's. In Holland they well remember how Rotterdam stole most of London's dock trade. If you want to fly to London, you may only have one option. But if you want the best "hub" airport at which to change flights, you look at rival options.

Heathrow is a saga of success. The great Victorian painter WP Frith painted the crowds at Brunel's Paddington Station as the epitome of a city at the height of its confidence-Who would now paint Heathrow in the same spirit? But they should. Heathrow is to the London of the 21st century what the docks were to the London of the 19th century. It's one of the principal generators of jobs and wealth: maybe even the top. Never forget the amount of freight that comes through it, as well as passengers. It's an unlovely sight.

Richard Rogers's Terminal Five - much of it a glorified shopping mall - won't make it look much lovelier. But when construction is complete, in about 2007, Heathrow could handle more than 80 million passengers a year, instead of today's 60 or so million.

There will be pollution. There will be extra road traffic, even though the Piccadilly Line and the Heathrow Express will both have direct connections. But the squeamish can console themselves that the British Airports Authority isn't uprooting villages, farmers or graves. (In less fastidious days, one of Thomas Hardy's first jobs as a trainee architect was to rebury the corpses from St Pancras churchyard to make way for the main line to the grand terminus.) Terminal Five's site is where "solids" used to be settled out from London sewage in special ponds. Not a heritage to write home about.

Terminal Five goes against the fashionable notion that, in a spirit of regeneration, we should push everything eastwards within London. Homes, jobs, transport improvements. Yet, for all the undoubted success of Canary Wharf and its environs, cities can' t be infinitely pushed around by planners. An unstoppable urban dynamic exists.

Despite Gatwick to the south, Stansted to the north and the flourishing but tiny City Airport in Docklands, air transport in London remains quintessentially a west-side story.

In the half-century since Heathrow was founded, anyone who's gone to live in west London, or in western outliers like Slough, has always known that the airport-driven prosperity came with a price tag, especially noise. It's too late to reverse this. And, anyway, London can't afford to.

One day, no doubt, Heathrow will go the way of the great Thames docks. Life will move on. It will be one with Nineveh and Tyre. Its travelators and check-in desks will be lovingly preserved by English Heritage. But, fortunately for Londoners, that moment hasn't yet come. To build up London's (and Britain's) future prosperity, the Government is belatedly taking the right decision. The battle with Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt is joined. May our best man win.