London’s Stansted Airport has had a pretty great year. The return of British Airways to its runways at the end of 2023 helped boost numbers and the ‘Taylor Swift effect’ in August saw a record 103,000 people passing through the airport in one day, many of whom were travelling home after seeing Taylor Swift at Wembley. Overall, it welcomed a record-breaking 29 million passengers in the 12 months up to September 2024.
What do you do with all that success? Why, get a billion-pound upgrade, of course. Planning permission for a huge extension was granted a year ago, and now the airport has revealed what that could look like.
At the centre of the plans is a £600m extension at the main terminal. It will bring more seating areas, new shops, bars and restaurants to the air hub. The huge expansion will increase its capacity to 43 million a year and increase the number of destinations Stansted flies to (right now it flies to 200 destinations across 40 countries).
Besides the extension, the big plans also include an enlarged security hall installed with state of the art equipment, an on-site solar farm, an enlarged immigration hall and increased baggage capacity.
Watch your backs, Heathrow and Gatwick — big things are coming for Stansted. Here’s a glimpse at what the expansion will look like:
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In more news from the capital’s airports, London City is expanding with millions more passengers, London Heathrow is now officially the most connected airport in the world and only one London is officially ‘recommended’ by Which? in the advice company’s latest review of British airports.
London’s Stansted airport just opened a very fancy new passenger lounge.
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