Chancellor George Osborne hinted at possible government support for a “Boris Island” new airport for London.
London Mayor Boris Johnson is keen on a Thames Estuary airport for the capital while architect Lord Foster has also put forward plans for a four-runway venue capable of handling 150 million passengers a year.
The Government has already ruled out a third runway at Heathrow airport in west London.
Mr Osborne said they would explore all the options for maintaining the UK’s aviation hub status, with the exception of a third runway at Heathrow.
Sir James Dyson has backed ambitious plans for a new £50bn airport in the Thames Estuary, saying Britain needs to “revive the thinking on a grand scale that characterised the Victorian age of invention”.
The billionaire designer said the UK had lost the “ambition and vision” of past generations and said the UK needed more large-scale infrastructure projects such as the four-runway aviation hub proposed by architect Lord Foster.
Sir James said: “There was a time when Britain’s infrastructure was envied across the globe. Our railways, roads and sewers put us well ahead of our European neighbours in the race to industrialise.”
The inventor, who designed the Dyson vacuum, said despite annual airport passenger numbers in the UK standing at 127 million and constantly rising, the country is not prepared for the future.
“Large-scale infrastructure projects offer a solution and, rather than pie-in-the sky, projects such as the proposed Thames Estuary airport are exactly what we need.”
Lord Foster outlined his plans for the major project, claiming the airport, located on the Isle of Grain in Kent, would be capable of handling 150 million passengers a year.
Known as the Thames Hub, it would have high-speed rail connections to London, the Midlands and northern England as well as continental Europe and links to key ports. Throwing his weight behind the plans, Sir James added: “Let’s think big, push our engineers to the edge of their abilities, and create an airport that is the envy of the world. Projects such as these will set us up for the future, create jobs and demand expertise that we can sell to the world.”