New £2.5bn Heathrow Terminal 2 opens 4th June

The brand new £2.5bn Heathrow Terminal 2, The Queen’s Terminal, opens at 6am this Wednesday 4 June 2014 and for passengers arriving in London there’s a wide range of London hotels to choose from just a 15 minute train journey away on the Heathrow Express.

Passengers aboard a United Airlines flight from Chicago, due to land at 05.55 on 4th June 2014, will be among the first to experience the new Heathrow Terminal 2, known as Terminal 2 – The Queen’s Terminal, in honour of Her Majesty The Queen.

The new £2.5bn terminal with its distinctive triple-wave by internationally renowned Luis Vidal + Architects will serve 20 million passengers a year, and will be home to STAR Alliance, Aer Lingus and Virgin Atlantic’s domestic flights.

Replacing the old terminal which opened in 1955 and closed 54 years later in 2009, Terminal 2 houses an ultra-modern facility behind its environmentally considerate glazed façades. Within the ripple-like structure is a two-level departure lounge, ten-metre tall viewing windows, and 33 shops and 17 restaurants including the first John Lewis department store within an airport and Heston Blumenthal’s The Perfectionists’ Café.

If any restaurant could take the pain out of a prolonged stay in the departure lounge, Heston Blumenthal’s The Perfectionists’ Café must surely be it. The café takes inspiration from Heston’s ‘In Search of Perfection’ television programmes and presents the chefs’ best versions of the original ‘perfection’ dishes including pizzas, fish and chips and burgers in a brioche bun.

Look up in the central Heathrow Terminal 2 courtyard and you’ll see Richard Wilson’s Slipstream sculpture, an ambitious artwork inspired by the world of aviation, which at 76 metres is longer than the world’s largest passenger airliner.

Following the soft launch on 4th June, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh will officially open Terminal 2 on 23rd June 2014.

For more information on these and other great new openings in London in summer 2014, go to LondonTown.com where a wide choice of London hotels to suit all budgets is given as well as information on restaurants, attractions and all the latest London happenings.