Croydon Airport

…City (La Guardia), London (Croydon), Paris (Le Bourget), and Berlin (Tempelhof) were laid out on sites close to the city centres. Because even transport aircraft of the period were relatively light, paved runways were a rarity. Croydon, Tempelhof, and Le Bourget, for example, all operated from grass strips only.…

Croydon Aerodrome, established in 1915 (closed in 1959), was the predecessor of Heathrow as London’s civil airport. The borough suffered from extensive bombing during World War II.