Come Friendly Bombs...
...and fall on Slough
In 1937, Sir John Betjeman published a poem which began: “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now”; the intervening years have not improved matters one iota. In fact, I rather think the reverse may be true.
The Holiday Inn Express Terminal 5 is handy for Terminal 5 in absolutely no way whatsoever; it is a four mile walk to the terminal. The Holiday Inn Express Terminal 5 is in Slough. It is quicker to walk to Wraysbury.
So, as it was 15th June and I was staying here, that’s what I did. Wraysbury is a small village on the River Thames opposite Runnymede which is where they say the Magna Carta was signed. As I am sure you know, the 15th June 2015 was celebrated as the eight-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta and the village seemed quite excited about it all; with huge banners on the front of buildings and an exhibition in the church. It seemed churlish to point out to them that the calendar changed from the Julian to the Gregorian in 1752 and so the 15th June 1215 was not the same as 15th June 2015, so I just joined in. I walked through the village and across the meadows, knee-high with grasses and buttercups where brown and white cattle graze in the evening sun.
The footpath leads directly from the village to Magna Carta Island and then across the river is Runnymede and the Magna Carta Monument where Her Majesty the Queen had, on that very day, joined with the Prime Minister, David Cameron, in celebrating the anniversary. Neither apparently aware that they had definitely got the wrong day and maybe even the wrong place.
On my side of the river, in the lengthening shadows of the remains of St. Mary’s Priory, stands the Ankerwycke Yew. This is a living thing which has stood here for at least 1,400 years and may be older than that. It may pre-date the birth of Christ, it may be older than the years we count. In the thirteenth century this tree and the priory may have stood above the marshy ground on the banks of the Thames.
This may have been an important meeting place for centuries. This could well have been where the great charter was signed and sealed. The one thing that I’ve found out since school is that most of the things that they told me in the lessons I actually turned up for were not true or, at the very least, weren’t certain. I wouldn’t have minded being told by a teacher that they didn’t quite know where the Magna Carta was signed but, they were fairly sure that it was signed at a place somewhere between Staines and Windsor. What I do mind was being told that what they said was the truth when it might not have been. And I also mind them missing out all the interesting stuff and asking me to remember the dull stuff.
In fairness to them, it is easy to miss the interesting stuff. Going back to my mention of Heathrow’s Terminal 5, how many passengers notice the really interesting stuff? People might be aware that Terminal 5 is actually three terminals with the satellite terminals 5B and 5C being bigger than many airports all by themselves. They might know that it has its very own railway station connecting it to central London in 21 minutes; they might have picked up on the fact that its underground railway linking the three parts of the terminal can move 6,000 passengers an hour; it’s possible they’ll realise that they are arriving at the station for this train on Europe’s longest escalator. They might have heard that, behind the scenes, is the largest baggage handling system anywhere in the world with 16 miles of conveyer belts and tracks. They might know that Terminal 5 is actually, all by itself, the third largest airport in the UK; in 2018, it handled over thirty-two million passengers; more than either Manchester or Stansted. They might even know that the main building is the largest freestanding structure in the whole of the United Kingdom and was so tall that it would have blocked the view from the air traffic control tower, meaning that a new tower had to be built.
The new tower is twice the height of Nelson’s Column and cost £50,000,000 in 2004; and that’s back when fifty million quid was a lot of money. It was built off site and then transported here. I told you that Heathrow was big and, in a land of giants, Terminal 5 stands head and shoulders above the rest.
People travelling through the terminal on one of its 211,000 annual flights might know all of that but do they know it was also the site of the biggest archaeological dig ever in the UK? This dig was entirely funded by Heathrow Airport and it was truly gigantic. It covered the 250 acres where the terminal, its two satellites and most of the aircraft stands now lie. Archaeologists spent fifteen months at the site and found over 80,000 objects including 18,000 pieces of pottery, 40,000 pieces of flint and a 2,500-year-old wooden bowl, the only one from this period ever found in the UK.
The excavation eventually uncovered nine thousand years of the area’s history. At that time, during the Mesolithic, this area would have been woodland with fairly small, mobile camps of hunter-gathers gathering the nuts and berries they could find and using stone and wood tools to hunt and catch the animals. The archaeologists found their flint tools and evidence of pits which had been dug using just deer antlers, perhaps to cook over or maybe just to dispose of rubbish. The first farmers of the Neolithic settled here around six thousand years ago, clearing the trees to plant their crops and using the wood to build shelters.
Around 3,600 BC these farmers built what has become known as the Stanwell Cursus. Two ditches about 20 metres apart were dug and the soil from the ditches was piled in between to form a raised platform or walkway. That might not sound like too big a deal until you discover that it was well over two miles long and crossed two rivers; it was about the same length as Heathrow’s southern runway today. Archaeologists say that Neolithic people would walk down this cursus and pray to their gods but, just like my teachers with their Magna Cartas, they are making it up. Archaeologists say ritual or ceremonial activity when what they mean is: “Not a Scooby Doo, pal.”
The farmers stayed and, during the Bronze Age, felled much of the remaining woodland and set out their farms with their own boundaries and tracks running between them. Their roundhouses would have dotted the landscape, divided up into small fields to grow barley and wheat and to keep sheep and cattle. During the Iron Age a village would have grown up between where the main Terminal 5 and Terminal 5B sit today. A cluster of circular houses with steeply pitched thatched rooves and pastures for their animals nearby. Sometime after the Roman invasion of Britain, a wide road, or droveway, heading off towards Londinium was created to take the animals to market.
By medieval times the main farm which was found by the archaeologists, had moved to sit just to the south of the main terminal building, with a farmhouse and two large barns; timber-framed with wattle and daub walls and reed-thatched rooves. People don’t always see all of those things when they look at Terminal 5 today but if you ever sit in Café Nero on the departures level and look out over what is there today, try to think of what was there before you and contemplate how, in nine thousand years’ time, you’ll be archaeology, too and so will all of the things you see around you. And while what seems important today will be dust, the things that appear dull today will be a source of fascination to future archaeologists. Even in fifty years, they will be fascinated by the place you are in today and think how amazing someone from a hundred years ago would find it.
Imagine how incredible you would find the everyday if you’d woken up this morning and it was Sunday 21st January 1728 or Sunday 21st January 2345. Really, stop for a second. How amazing would that be? Yet how ordinary it would seem to those who felt that it was just another day? We are so lucky to have today, don’t let it go past without noticing how special it is. Even in Slough, probably.
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I’ve flown through T5 at least 100 times but didn’t know some of these facts! Well done. ✈️