Colin Stephen Matthews CBE FREng (born 20 April 1956) is a British businessman, and the Chairman of Highways England, a position he has held since 2014; and EDF Energy; he is also an English composer of contemporary classical music. Noted for his large-scale orchestral compositions, Matthews is a prolific arranger of other composer's music, including works by Berlioz, Britten, Dowland, Mahler, Purcell and Schubert.[1]
He attended the independent Oundle School in north Northamptonshire. He is the son of Sir Peter Matthews, the former boss of Vickers, and was born in Canada. [1] He holds dual Canadian-British nationality.
In 1977 he gained a First Class MA degree in Engineering from the University of Cambridge. In 1984 he gained an MBA from INSEAD, a famous business school in France. He became a Chartered Engineer.
He started out on an engineering apprenticeship at Lucas Girling, a brakes manufacturer, in Birmingham, in 1977.
He joined GE in 1988.
In 1997 he became Managing Director of the engineering division of British Airways. As Technical Director, he left British Airways in 2001.
In 2008 he became Chief Executive of BAA plc, renamed Heathrow Airport Holdings in 2012. He announced his resignation from Heathrow Airport Holdings on 1 April 2014 [2] when he announced he would leave the company later that year. Heathrow is Europe's busiest airport.
On 21 July 2014 he was appointed as Chairman of the Highways Agency, [3] which became Highways England in December 2014. [4] He took up his position at the Highways Agency on 1 September 2014. As of 2015, Matthews was paid a salary of between £130,000 and £134,999 by the agency for his part-time role, making him one of the 328 most highly paid people in the British public sector at that time. [5]
He is married with four children. He has a French wife, Florence. In 2015 he became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He lives in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, with another house in France. He enjoys sailing in Cornwall. [6] He is a devout Christian. [7]
British Airways plc (BA) is the flag carrier airline of the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in London, England, near its main hub at Heathrow Airport.
Heathrow Airport, called London Airport until 1966, and now known as London Heathrow, is the main international airport serving London, the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdom. It is the largest of the six international airports in the London airport system.
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Heathrow Terminal 1 is a disused airport terminal at London Heathrow Airport that was in operation between 1968 and 2015. When it was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II in April 1969, it was the largest new airport terminal in western Europe. At the time of its closure on 29 June 2015 to make way for the expansion of Heathrow Terminal 2 it had been handling only twenty daily flights by British Airways to nine destinations. From May 2017 the contents of the terminal were put up for auction.
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In 2016 the Women's Engineering Society (WES), in collaboration with the Daily Telegraph, produced an inaugural list of the United Kingdom's Top 50 Influential Women in Engineering, which was published on National Women in Engineering Day on 23 June 2016. The event was so successful it became an annual celebration. The list was instigated by Dawn Bonfield MBE, then Chief Executive of the Women's Engineering Society. In 2019, WES ended its collaboration with the Daily Telegraph and started a new collaboration with The Guardian newspaper.
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