Every day, millions of stories begin and end at Heathrow. Travellers embark on journeys with uncertain endings. Students strike out for new lives in unfamiliar countries. Parents return home. Lovers meet in Arrivals for the first time, or the hundredth time, or the last time. People wait in limbo, fall asleep on benches, hunker down for the night when they have no other place to stay. People say goodbye. Things end here. Things begin.

To mark its seventieth anniversary the airport launched a campaign to collect and display some of these stories. There were several strands to this effort. Travellers were invited to send in their own tales of the airport, with 7,000 of the best submissions being rewarded with prizes which ranged from commemorative luggage tags to plane tickets for desirable destinations on the other side of the world.

A select number of these stories were displayed on the Heathrow website, creating something akin to an oral history of the airport, albeit a heavily-moderated one (two of the criteria stories were judged on were how “heart-warming” they were, and how well they showcased the airport as a “catalyst for change”).

In addition to this, the airport selected a set of 70 stories of its own. These were to be printed up on large vinyl stickers (referred to puzzlingly as “commemorative plaques”) and applied to walls across all four terminals, as close to the locations to which they pertained as possible.

These stickers are, two years later, all that remains of this campaign. Some have been removed, while others have faded into the background. Few, if any, of the tens of thousands of people who register the existence of these curious notices stop to read them, preoccupied instead with interpreting the thousands of functional signs that proliferate in Heathrow. Fewer still make use of the Instagram hashtag once nurtured by Heathrow Public Relations. Despite this, many of the plaques remain. Here’s one of them:

And another, not far away, stickered to a glass barrier outside Terminal 2:

A full list with their locations is, in fact, still available online. Most are of a fairly similar texture: they revolve around the fleeting presence of celebrities, the filming of popular movies, and occasionally the passing-through of British royalty. One references a piece of artwork in Terminal 2, noting that it is the “most viewed” piece of art in Europe. All are generally positive, peppy, clean and flat.

But what about the other stories – those submitted by ordinary travellers? At one time these were archived on a page on Heathrow’s website… but it’s a page that has since been removed. Even the Internet Archive only retains a plain white shell of it, without any of the curated content. Visit heathrow.com/stories, and you’ll be redirected to the main page of Heathrow’s website. The Instagram hashtag hasn’t been used in months. Heathrow Media Centre, when asked, seem unaware that stories submitted by the general public were ever part of the campaign.

What remains, then, is only the glossy official selection of Heathrow’s multitude of stories – the chocolate box of celebrity sightings, Hollywood movies, glamour. These stories remain available not just to read online, but stickered to the walls of the Terminals. These few fortunate travellers, out of the millions that pass through each day, have somehow left a mark on the place. They have become a part of the physical texture of Heathrow. All other stories exist only in personal recollections, in memory, in unofficial records. By the airport itself, the vast majority of stories are almost immediately forgotten.