Boeing, Boeing, gone

Major flight paths criss-cross over plenty of covetable areas of the UK. Eleanor Doughty explores what it’s like to live with a 747 soundtrack and whether it affects property values.

- Eleanor Doughty

PICNICKING on the banks of the Thames in Runnymede, four miles from Windsor, you see them before you hear them: the aeroplanes. Welcome to flight-path land, a collection of regions of the UK in which people voluntarily subject themselves to living directly under soaring engines, to hearing that familiar rumbling, day in, day out.

Some hate it, others barely notice. One of the latter group, Amelia Daniel, who works for Strutt & Parker and lives in Fulham, west London, says it’s not so bad. Moving there, ‘we were aware that we’d probably end up hearing all the planes coming into Heathrow. Two years later, I don’t notice it at all’. Still, she adds, it isn’t ideal. ‘It’s saddening that there is so much airborne traffic that you just become accustomed to it. The noise isn’t the biggest issue here, it’s the environmental impact.’