Incidentally, the runway where I live is a shuttle landing option so suitable for heavy and long haul. I'd welcome the expansion and building of an airport. The compulsory purchase on my house would be just the push we need to emigrate!
There are several suitable airfields dotted around... Unfortunately they are now housing estates (Greenham Common), in use (Brize Norton), or at the wrong end of the A11 (Lakenheath)
So we're stuck with what we have, at least geographically...
Incidentally, don't tell Kevin, but I did a project at school proposing a brand new airport at West Tisted... iirc it's geographically suitable
The future could be smaller airports with heavy capacity, owned and operated by single carriers with feeder flights...
Not convinced? Take Dubai... Dnata is owned by the brother of the chap who owns Emirates. They operate Dubai airport and provide all the ground handling. They have just started operating the Emirates ground handling at Gatwick. Emirates happen to have large interest in Airbus, and also, more significantly in Easy Jet.
It wouldn't take much of a leap to acquire an underused RAF base, build a double sided Terminal with 10 A380 gates on one side and twenty A318/319/320/321 gates on the other.
The basic premise being that a single carrier could land all their longhaul flights from their home hub in one place and operate a regional feeder service using their local pet airline.
BA used to do it to good effect from Gatwick, they basically paid for the North Terminal (and later the runway extension), using Cityflyer as their regional shuttle to feed their European and International services.
If the government and airports don't do summat, some one will, and it's looking like the future could be orange, with an Arabian flourish