Not many people get to park their car here – bang in the middle of Heathrow airport, on the taxiway just a stretch of grass away from where a line of passenger planes is coming in to land.

It’s close enough to see the shimmering air and smoke as nose tyres hit the tarmac. “An A380 will put down as much rubber as a car’s entire tyre,” Jack Quantick-Thorne says. He knows – part of his job is to ensure the runway team scrapes it off and patches things up overnight. And it is all recycled, he adds.