Jetting off for a Christmas break?

You’ll be heading to the airport and following in the footsteps of generations of festive sun-seekers.

A few things won’t be happening. Your car won’t be flying out with you. Nor will you be leaving from Croydon airport, let alone Wolverhampton’s airport at Pendeford.

And while you will no doubt be hit in the pocket for your holiday, today’s era of mass airborne travel is a far cry from the days when only the well-heeled could afford to take a plane.

We’ve taken a dip into our picture archives to evoke times when going to the airport was a magical adventure and remember the days before catching a flight became routine, albeit one accompanied by varying degrees of hassle.

Birmingham Airport is preparing for its busiest Christmas ever, with over half a million people forecast to travel through there this festive season. It is an airport which has both come a long way since it opened as Elmdon Airport in 1939, and come a short way - its hub has moved from the original site south of the runway, to today’s vast complex on the north side. 

Our archive picture captures a key moment in the journey when in 1961 a new international terminal, costing £130,000, opened in the first step in a major development designed to give the Midlands a fully international airport capable of accommodating some of the world's largest aircraft. The airport as we know it now started to take shape when a new terminal on the other side of the runway was opened by the Queen in 1984. 

The rest, as they say, is modern history. 

Heathrow was already a huge complex by the mid-1950s, with the opening in 1955 of a new control tower and passenger handling building. Our pictures show the main concourse and also an aerial overview in which there are no jet aircraft to be seen. Truly a different age.

Yet Heath Row, as it was spelt in the early days, was a latecomer compared to Croydon, which was Britain’s first major international airport. It pioneered Britain’s first international air routes across Europe, Asia, and Australia, and boasted Britain’s first purpose-built terminal and control tower.

Croydon’s heyday was the 1930s but the site had no room for post-war expansion and finally closed on September 30, 1959.

Just as the striking original 1930s Elmdon Airport control tower has been preserved and is a listed building, so has the 1928 control tower at Croydon, built in a neo-classical design.

As for Wolverhampton airport, you could indeed fly on holiday from there, so long as you were not planning to go very far. In the 1950s Wolverhampton Aviation ran the airport for the council, with the first scheduled flight to Jersey on July 18, 1953, in a de Havilland Rapide biplane.

Don Everall Aviation later took over, but grass runways and limited technical facilities saw the end come when Everall’s agreement expired on December 31, 1970, and the site is now built over.

If you are taking your car on holiday, it won’t be on the plane with you, but there were days when that was possible for the short hop over the English Channel. Air ferry services, in which the car was cargo, reached their peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the market was killed off by roll-on roll-off ferries.