Croydon had the world’s first airport terminal, and then it had a retail park
For nearly forty years, if you flew out of Britain you flew out of Croydon. The building is still standing on Purley Way, and it opens one Sunday a month.
Every schoolchild in Croydon is told at some point that the borough used to have London’s airport. It sounds like the sort of thing a town says about itself. It is completely true, and the scale of it is larger than the claim suggests.
London Terminal Aerodrome, 1920
Croydon became operational as London Terminal Aerodrome on 29 March 1920, taking over from a temporary field at Hounslow Heath. It sat about twelve miles south of central London on what had been a First World War airfield, and for the next four decades it was where Britain met the rest of the world by air.
The building that invented the airport
The terminal, control tower and associated buildings were finished in 1928 and opened on 30 January that year. It was the first purpose-built airport terminal anywhere in the world, and the control tower on its roof was the first of those too. Everything that now feels obvious about an airport — a single building where you check in, wait, and are told which aircraft is yours — was worked out here, because nobody had done it before.
Croydon was also the birthplace of Imperial Airways, Britain’s first international airline, formed in 1924 out of a government-sponsored merger of four smaller companies. It was the ancestor of BOAC and, eventually, of British Airways.
Why it ended
The problem was the one every early airport had: it was hemmed in. Croydon had grown around the aerodrome, and grass and short runways could not take the jets that were coming. Heathrow and Gatwick took the traffic, and Croydon closed on 30 September 1959 — thirty-nine years and six months after it opened.
What is there now
Purley Way is a retail corridor: sheds, drive-throughs and car parks. That is not an accident of planning, it is the airfield’s footprint. Flat, huge, already served by a wide arterial road built to reach it. The reason a coach can get around Purley Way so easily is that the road was laid out for an airport.
And the terminal survived. Airport House still stands on Purley Way with the 1928 control tower on top, and the Visitor Centre inside opens on the first Sunday of every month. Visitor parking is free, and small groups can arrange a private guided tour on another day by writing to them first.
If your group wants to see it, book the coach around the first Sunday — not the other way round. It is the one date in Croydon we plan a trip backwards from.