It's T5RRIFIC

I make no apologies (for as you know, I am always right), for the whorey 'Sizzling, Soaraway, SUN' style title to this post. I just felt that after all the bad press about Heathrow's new Terminal 5 that it was up to me to start its swing back to favour. So it's with that thought in mind, I leave 'The Heights' and deviate from my usual Sunday constitutional and get on the Piccadilly line. Well I have a 6 zone Oystercard and I'm not afraid to use it!

What seems like hours later, because it was, I am thrilled to find myself hurling down an hitherto unriden part of the tube system. Those familiar with with the old Heathrow loop will remember riding the never ending curve that appears as a tear drop on the tube map. No longer do you have to endure the whiplash as shortly after leaving Terminal 123 station you head straight for T5. I get up to the door long before the train enters the new station and decide to stand next to the 'Starboard' side doors, after all, I know the Nigerian cleaning lady dribbling onto her royal Blue tabard will be particularly impressed that I know which side to alight from. After all I've used T5 so many times, well that's what I want her to think!
Anywho, I swagger onto the sterile platform (just the way I like it), natural daylight is evident which is the motivation for all new tube station designs, Natural light, must have natural light.

I swan through new oversided ticket barriers, presumably installed to cater for the influx of fat yanks and increasingly 'circumferencially challenged' Brits.

Like a set from Metropolis you are greated by mighty escalators and banks of swanky glass elevators held in place by lovely blue stantions. I choose the escalators, I struggle with the whole elevator/ tube thing. I did get trapped at Goodge Street once. I had to decide whom of my fellow 'trappees' I would have to eat first!
It is however at the top of said escalator that I encounter my hopefully only T5 related terror. GLASS FLOORS! The glass is WAY to clear and you can clearly see 30 feet below where you are likely to end up a sticky mess should the glass give way. You have to walk across it, as it's immediately beyond the escalator stair return sump. The effect however is to make you stop at the top of the escaltor, just where you don't want to stop. We've all seen the piles ups when some doddery idiot decides to stop at the top or bottom of one of the big escalators. Oh how we've laughed as finger are 'snicked' off betwix stair combs and trousers ripped as they snag the machinery!
Thankfully no one saw me panic, nearly lost my cool there! I enter a dissapointingly T2 style arrivals hall, Travelex to the left, Krispy Kreme to the right. Nice banks of escalators and elevators painted different sherbet colours, 'To aid orientation' no doubt and white giant 'communion wafer' style sound baffles overhead. They've got there escalators in a pickle though, I'm sure I went up one to a landing who's only point of exit was an escalator coming down towards you.
I'm asked, "are you OK sir?", "You look a bit lost". Me, lost, proposterous, I know my way around T5, ask that Nigerian Cleaning lady with the wet patch on her tabard. She knows.

I pretend to know what I'd doing and look at my watch and walk away purposefully.

20 escalators and various rides up and down glass lifts later and I arrive in the departures hall.

Where were the people sleeping in cardboard boxes? The chaos, the mountains of luggage? Hysterical Hindus? Bewildered staff?

It was a beautiful scene of sweeping white steel and serenity, arty images float across huge LED screens and mean bugger all but look pretty. It really is lovely, you can see from end to end and from front to back, one of the things I liked about Stansted. You can see Windsor Castle to the West, Thorpe Park rollercoasters to the South and the Wembley Arch, well somewhere over there beyond Southall. The views are sensational and being so elevated you are looking down at planes as if in the control tower which incidentally you can see to the East over on airside.

I stopped at Caffe Nero, one of only a couple of eateries, the interesting stuff is airside, such as Gordon Ramsey's much slated 'Plane Food' (stupid name).

I spend a few happy hours drawing a beautifully designed 'structural node' and enjoying the airport environment happy in the knowledge I don't have to fly anywhere. I sup on my Frappe skinny Latte mochaccino thingy.

I ask one of the many 'Can I help you' bods if it's always this quiet? It is obviously running a low capacity, particulary now BA has moved Long haul back to the other Ts. But aparently it is, as it's just so vast. They've clearly been too busy trying to reunite 50,000 pieces of lost luggage with their owners to come up with superlatives, but I'm sure you could fit the Empire State Building in there (sideways obviously). But thankfully they haven't tried, so we can enjoy the luscious space that reminds me of Shanghai's Pudong airport (hark at me). Though the only problem with vast glazed terminii is that they can't be airconditioned quickly enough to counteract solar gain. So as Pudong smells of sweat, rotten Eggs and noodles, let's pray T5 doesn't suffer the same fate, or at very worst, let's hope us poor 'landsiders' at least get a whaft of Ramsey's over priced fare.