'Slipstream'

Today I was at Heathrow's Terminal 2, which is not yet operational. Loads of people have volunteered to come along and test its operational readiness, so today over a thousand members of the public came along and pretended to check in and proceed through to departures.

They were an interesting bunch. There were some families and some older gentlemen in tweed on their own, and there were young people, some a bit geeky looking and some who looked fashionable and not like 'plane nerds at all! And they were all interested in the airport. Occasionally drawn into conversation I was asked if I'd heard the latest about which airlines would be at T2 and also why Concorde wasn't in its hanger. (I couldn't reply satisfactorily to either.)

And in the huge main space that you see when you come out of the elevators or that you ascend into via escalator is this, Richard Wilson's 'Slipstream', which he conceived "to transpose the thrill of the air-show to the architectural environment of the international air terminal". I'm not sure it's thrilling, as such, but it is impressive as it twists and turns over the seventy metres of its length.