My favourite orange hexagonal airport is closing this week, almost a decade after the original date, making way for the highly blah, much delayed, extremely suss new airport south of the old Flughafen Schönefeld which opened in the middle of a pandemic.

Living in Wedding, we could get to the airport in a few minutes by bus — even quicker for the taxi drivers who knew the tree-lined shortcut along the canal. Yeah, it was old and creaky, but drop-off to boarding was the quickest and chillest of any airport I’ve been in. Coming in to land from the east across lakes and city I’d read the ground finding Wedding and Uferhallen as we descended. Even getting to the south of Berlin was lazy easy, bus to Hauptbahnhof and M41 to Kreuzberg and Neukölln.

Before this terminal was built in the ’60s, before it was a military airport and one used during the Berlin Airlift, it was home to the Royal Prussian Airship battalion. And before that, the artillery range when the Exercier Platz der Artillerie got pushed west into the Jungfernheide forest from near what’s now the corner of Seestr. and Iranische Str. (which had a different name back then).

Unlike the beautiful Tempelhofer Feld, which has so far avoided necrocapitalist property seizure and ‘development’ and remains an open field like it’s been for hundreds of years, Flughafen Tegel has had the money class salivating along with the government. And being Berlin and Germany, we know they’ll ruin it like they did Potsdamer Platz or the new Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg. It’s what money does.

I first flew from TXL in late-2008, I think, going to London and Whitstable. No photos of that except a grainy one of me returning at night, and I remember hating coming back to face a hard winter and poverty. A year later, Dasniya and I flew early morning to Brussels to work with Roméo Castellucci on the Wagner opera Parsifal. Deep geologic layers of frozen snow and air cold as sharp knives.

Remembering my favourite airport this week as it comes to a close.