IN 1967 Southend Airport was booming, checking in 692,000 passengers, many of them taking a quick flight to France with their cars to beat the Channel ferries in DC4s given a huge nose with doors to turn them into car-carrying planes.

No longer. Today weeds grow in the car parks. Going into the terminal, I found that there was only one scheduled flight a week. To the Channel Islands. On Saturdays. Summers only. Last year the airport recorded just 3,900 passengers. So why is it that the airport’s owners are pressing so hard to remove a Grade I listed medieval church at the end of the runway? The applicants say they need to move the church to comply with Civil Aviation Authority regulations on Runway End Safety Areas. St Laurence Eastwood is an active church with a loyal congregation and four services each Sunday and Southend-on-Sea Borough Council received 6,000 letters objecting to the airport’s application for consent to demolish the church. The planning committee heeded the strength of feeling and unanimously rejected the application.

This is not the end of the matter. The airport director, Roger Campbell, says: “We intend to lodge an appeal within the six-month deadline.” The airport already has permission for a new terminal beside the Southend-Billericay railway, which it argues could provide a practical alternative to the crowded roads that lead to Southend. The airport, it is says, will create business and employment. But it is also situated at the edge of a populous residential area and will cause great disturbance. Southend is not a regional airport such as Bristol or Southampton, conveniently near a motorway, and Stansted already provides a prodigious range of connections and cheap flights for all of East Anglia.

If the BBC’s Restoration series had awarded the prize to the champions of historic buildings, rather than the buildings themselves, the St Laurence campaigners would have deserved a place in the final. Two of them, Mr and Mrs Marlow, live opposite the church in one of a row of cottages that was built for returning First World War soldiers, surrounded by turkeys, geese and ducks — a scene worthy of The Darling Buds of May.

Mrs Marlow went round Southend raising signatures, talking to people in hospital waiting rooms and supermarkets. “People can be so complacent,” she says. “You have to go out and explain the threat to get action.”

The airport authorities insist that they do not wish to demolish St Laurence but merely to move the structure bodily and lay down a number of headstones which relatives will be able to visit. Yet, even with the most modern technology, any building that is moved is subject to enormous stress and is likely to crack in many places, shedding a great deal of ancient plaster and patina.

The particular charm of St Laurence is that it bears the marks of its age and its many builds. The church is Norman in origin, with a 13th-century chancel, gabled 14th-century south aisle, Tudor porch and weatherboarded tower with needle-thin spire. There is mellow pink brick, rubble stone and ancient render. There is no sign of a grand squire’s pew, yet the evidence is there of a loyal congregation over 1,000 years’ worship.

The engineers’ proposals for moving the church bear many caveats, partly because the parish has understandably been reluctant to let them crawl over their much-loved church and devise schemes for what they fairly see as its destruction.

The present Gadarene rush to expand airports all over the South of England needs to be compared to the call by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, 15 years ago, for a 1,000 new golf courses across the land. Up and down Britain developers hurried to obtain planning permission, saying that the new courses would be viable only if 200-300 houses (golf chalets was the polite word) were built beside the course. But the potential demand had been wildly overestimated — and numerous developers went bust. One fine country house park at Orchardleigh in Somerset was left looking like the battlefield of the Somme, churned into mud for tees and greens that were never laid out.

The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) has published an informative survey on historic buildings around all the big airports in the expansion plans of Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary — which the SPAB describes as the greatest single threat to historic buildings since the war (SPAB News, No 2, 2003). The Government proposes more major runways. It should look at the option adopted by several American airports — short take-off runways that greatly speed departing planes at rush hour, leaving the main runway largely free for incoming planes.