Heathrow Airport writer gets access to all areas

If you were asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that captures all the themes running through the modern world — from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our interconnectedness to our romanticising of travel — then you would almost certainly have to head to an airport. Airports, in all their horror, interest and beauty, are the imaginative centres of our civilisation.

I was therefore intrigued when, a few months ago, I heard that BAA, the owner of Heathrow Airport, had taken the unusual decision to appoint a writer-in-residence. This character would be given free rein to wander the premises for a week in August, from the control tower to the baggage carousels, and talk to staff and passengers alike. Then he or she would be asked to sit at a specially constructed desk in the departures hall and, in full view of everyone (with big screens projecting to the public what was being written on the computer), write a book in a few weeks, for publication in mid-September.

This seemed like a rare and fascinating offer. As a writer, I know how hard it is to have a reason to leave the house but more significantly, how hard it is to look for inspiration beyond domestic or historical events (which is why too much of contemporary literature is restricted to personal experience or the archives). At the same time, very few organisations can be bothered to open themselves up to strangers, who might ask the wrong questions and be a nuisance.

I was lucky to be picked for the job but I had a few long nights of the soul before accepting. Heathrow swarms with contentious issues, not least the burning question of the third runway, and I wanted to be sure that I'd be allowed to say what I pleased. My agent and I devised the cockroach test: in other words, I had to be allowed to discuss every last cockroach I might spot at the airport if that's what I felt like doing. To their credit, the airport took the point and didn't flinch.

Though Heathrow is routinely accused of being the biggest eyesore in the South-East, and though its environmental and noise impact is hard to forget, there aren't many industries that, without trying, attract legions of fans who want to do nothing more than sit around and watch your business going through its motions. Yet any day at Heathrow, you'll find dozens of spotters who understand the airport as well as many pilots, and who have come along for the simple pleasure that flows from watching planes take off and land.

There is something sublime about standing in a cloudless dawn at the end of 27LR, as Heathrow's northern runway is known to pilots, and observing a sequence of planes, each visible as a single diamond, lined up at different heights, on their final approach. Their wings unfold themselves into elaborate and unlikely arrangements of irregularly sized steel-grey panels. Wheels that last touched ground in San Francisco or Mumbai hesitate and seem to slow almost to a standstill as they arch and prepare to greet the rubber-stained English tarmac with a burst of smoke that makes manifest their planes' speed and weight.

At the back of Terminal 5, sibling 747s that would only recently have been separated out across the world park wing tip to wing tip, Johannesburg next to Delhi, Sydney next to Phoenix. Repetition lends their fuselage designs a particular beauty: the eye can follow series of identical motifs down a 15-strong line of dolphin-like bodies, the resulting aesthetic effect only enhanced by the knowledge that each plane costs $250 million and that what you're looking at is therefore evidence not just of the modern era's daunting technical intelligence but also of its inconceivable wealth.

Few planes spend very long at the airport. No sooner has an aircraft landed than fuel hoses are attached to the wings and the tanks are replenished with Jet A-1 (kerosene that will in just a few hours be steadily burned over the African savannah). In the vacant front cabins, where it might cost the equivalent of a small car to spend the night reclining in an armchair, cleaners scramble to pick up the financial weeklies, half-eaten chocolates and distorted foam earplugs left behind by the flight's complement of plutocrats and actors. Passengers disembark for whom an ordinary English morning will have a supernatural jet-lagged tinge.

The airport is full of emotion, both in departures and arrivals. For example, there is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race, however preoccupied with the payroll, who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come to meet him at arrivals. Though our loved ones have told us that they will be at work, though they showed no interest in the details of our itinerary, though they hated us for going travelling in the first place, though they left us last June or died 12-and-a-half years ago, it is hard not to experience a sense that they might have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special.

So what dignity is required not to evince any hesitation when it emerges, in the course of a 12-second scan of the line, that we are indeed alone on the planet with nowhere to head to other than a long queue at the ticket machine for the Heathrow Express. What maturity not to mind that only two metres from us, a casually dressed young man perhaps involved in the lifeguard industry has been met with a paroxysm of joy by a sincere and thoughtful-looking blonde with whose mouth he is now involved.