London Gatwick Airport (LGW) traces its origins to a small flying club that occupied the site in 1930, but its identity as a commercial airport began taking shape in 1934, when the aerodrome was licensed for public air services. The defining moment came on May 17, 1936, when a Jersey Airways de Havilland DH.86, operating under contract to British Airways Ltd., departed the newly completed Beehive terminal bound for Paris, the first scheduled commercial flight from what was then the world's first circular airport terminal. Designed by architect Frank Hoar at the direction of airport developer Morris Jackaman, the Beehive was a concrete structure connected to the adjacent railway station by an underground subway, allowing passengers to travel from London Victoria to the aircraft without stepping outside. A genuinely pioneering piece of infrastructure. The airport was officially opened on June 6, 1936, by Lord Swinton, the Secretary of State for Air.

Requisitioned by the RAF during the Second World War, Gatwick returned to civilian use in 1946 before closing for full reconstruction in 1956. The modern airport opened on June 9, 1958, when Queen Elizabeth II inaugurated what became the South Terminal, at the time the first airport in the world to integrate mainline rail, road, and air access under one roof. The North Terminal followed in 1988. Today, LGW operates a single active runway 3,316 metres long, with a standby runway too close in proximity to run simultaneously. Despite that constraint, it handled 43.2 million passengers in 2024, making it Europe's busiest single-runway airport and the UK's second-busiest overall.

Situated near Crawley in West Sussex, LGW is a hub for British Airways and an operating base for easyJet, its largest airline, which carried 19.1 million passengers through the airport in 2024. Low-cost short-haul volume is paired with a growing roster of long-haul routes to destinations including Singapore, Cape Town, and cities across North America, giving LGW a reach that its single-strip geography might not suggest. In 2025, the UK government approved plans to bring the northern runway into routine use, a development that could fundamentally reshape the airport's capacity for decades to come.