The main goal of BAA, the British Airport Authority and owner of all London airports, doesn’t seem to be making your time on one of their airports as comfortable as possible but rather, to make you so miserable that you are in desperate need of an overpriced pint or, depending on your personal preferences, some shopping to lighten your spirit.

You see, British airports have the lovely feature of telling you about your departure gate roughly two minutes before boarding starts. Until then you have to stay in a waiting area which, surprise, surprise, is right in the middle of the airport shopping mall. Naturally, the waiting area is packed. Naturally, about four fifth of the waiting groups have little kids with them. Naturally, they are either treating the whole thing as a giant adventure park or are as miserable as you and cry their little hearts out. In any case, don’t even think you can sit there and read in peace. The din even wins over the trusty old iPod.

Being Europe’s most busy airport and having only two runways, flight operations aren’t particularly smooth either. “We are number sixty nine for take-off and will be in the air in about three hours.” On arrival, your plane will always be stopped for twenty minutes somewhere boring because the gate has not been vacated yet. Being this busy, the first sign of any form of weather other than your regular London drizzle greatly endangers operations. Where else would an airport be effectively closed for an entire day because of half a meter of snow?

And then, if you are a lucky passenger of BA, there is the shiny new Terminal 5. Shiny it is, indeed; pretty, too. Built in the airy and spacious way all new airports seem to be, the kids can now wreck the waiting area in healthy, natural light. From a functional perspective, the design is a disaster (so, it is likely to win several architecture prizes). The tube arrives in level minus six or so, whereas the check-in area is, as always, on the top level. However, the architects managed to squeeze two floors of offices between the arrivals and check-in, so you have to go seven levels up (if I did count right). The main means of vertical transport thus is elevators, the least effective of all modes of transportation. For a busy airport: two thumbs up. Great choice.

Needless to say, the gates actually are one or two levels down from the check-in area. The idea behind this seems to allow more shops to be squeezed in. After all, this is what you came for. Or, as the Wikipedia author puts it, the main terminal building “contains a check-in hall, a departure lounge with retail stores and other passenger services”. Easy to imagine the design meeting: “Oh, right. Passenger services.”