“Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky
Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime,”
- Anne Bradstreet
The first time I saw Heathrow Airport was when my mum; my brother, Phil; and I were going on holiday to America; I was eleven years old. We flew from Manchester to Heathrow and then transferred onto a flight for San Francisco. Today, around a third of the 80 million or so passengers who fly from Heathrow every year are transfer passengers, never setting foot outside the airport at all. At its busiest in 2018, Heathrow had almost half a million flights to 203 destinations in 84 countries. Most of the numbers about Heathrow are big.
For a start, it covers more than 3,000 acres, has over 200 aircraft stands and it’s the largest single site employer in the United Kingdom with something like 76,000 people working at the airport and 114,000 local jobs supported by it – a fifth of all jobs in the five local boroughs. There are around 1.7 million metric tonnes of cargo moving through the airport every year, including 40% of all the country’s exports to non-EU nations.
The new Terminal 2 opened in 2014 and a year later the Airports Commission backed the building of a third runway at the airport. If that goes ahead it will involve the largest private civil engineering project in the world, ever. The plan for a third runway would expand the airport, diverting roads, putting part of the M25 into a new tunnel and involve the relocation of people and businesses in Sipson and Harmondsworth. Of course, the area would be much improved if they could also flatten Hillingdon, Hounslow and Cranford. The only people who could like these places are people who have never been there or people who have only otherwise lived in war zones. Cranford is particularly hideous.
One evening I decided to walk to the charmingly named Cranford Country Park. The route was ankle deep in litter and memorable mainly for the diesel fumes and discarded bottles of piss from the lorries on the Parkway and the M4, which passes along the northern boundary of this former seat of the Berkeley family. Rubbish sacks and the odd desultory crow flapped around in the evening breeze created by passing juggernauts. When I reached the park, I wasn’t able to get any specific information from the visitors’ centre, mainly due to the fact that it had been burned down. However, the charred remains of the graffitied 1970s brick building did give a general indication of the type of beauty to expect elsewhere. Apparently, the park has won a Green Flag every year since 2002. The award of a Green Flag must, therefore, signify a place which keeps the surrounding environment clean by being a repository for the borough’s dog shit.
I had read on the Hillingdon borough website that the former walled garden and St. Dunstan’s church were worth a visit and, indeed they are, if you have never seen a church before, or a wall. If you have, then I would stay on the M4 if I were you. However, there are, actually, two interesting things about the church but luckily, for you, you don’t need to visit it to find out about them. I’ve done that for you. The first is that it is the resting place of the ashes of Tony Hancock, the brilliant comedian who took his own life in Sydney in 1968, leaving a note which said, simply: “Things just seemed to go too wrong too many times.” His ashes were brought back to England by fellow comedian Willie Rushden and, somehow, one last thing went wrong and he ended up here.
I also found it rather interesting that there is a headstone here which is that of John Finall Cook and the headstone says mysteriously that he was “The Worst Used High Constable in England”; it does not go on to explain in what way John was badly used.
John lived from 1771 until 1856 and was the High Constable for the Hundred of Isleworth of Heston, Middlesex. Perhaps he was only badly used after his death seeing as instead of being laid to rest at All Saints Church in Isleworth, which lies at the end of a handsome row of Georgian houses and overlooks the River Thames towards the King’s Observatory in Richmond, he is here, in this shithole. You may, by now, be getting the impression that I find it unfortunate that this is one of the areas which will not be destroyed by the expansion of Heathrow. You are correct, if I lived here I would be a suicide bomber and would try to take as much of Cranford with me as possible when I went. That would, undoubtedly, buy me brownie points in the afterlife.
There are some things which might be swept away in any future expansion, though, that I would mourn. For instance, I adore Ordnance Survey maps and, just on the northern edge of Heathrow, by a car park, about three feet of the business end of a silver-painted cannon sticks up out of the ground. There’s also a plaque to explain this incongruous sight. The plaque tells you that it was placed here in 1926, when this place was farms and orchards, to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Major General William Roy, F.R.S.. Presumably he was neither a Major General nor a Fellow of the Royal Society at the time of his birth but his place in the history of Britain was sealed in 1784 when he measured the line from here to a point in Hampton which, by his measurement, was 27,404.01 feet away. This was, apparently, part of a project to measure the distance between the Greenwich Observatory and one in Paris using the methods of triangulation. This was to be done by first measuring a line very accurately. It is then possible to project two lines from this, at known angles, and to work out, by trigonometry, pretty much any measurement you like, just by projecting lots of triangles on a map. As I had understood less trigonometry than I did geography, this would not have been a job for me but, apparently, Roy was pretty good at this stuff. He had previously surveyed the whole of Scotland, so Hounslow Heath to Hampton must have been a breeze. A line was cleared and flattened between the two designated points and the entire length was measured by using 20ft long glass rods. These were chosen as they would not change their length with changes in temperature or in the rain. Roy died in 1790 but the following year, this baseline was used to begin the triangulation and mapping of the whole of Britain. This point, just here outside Heathrow, is the place where the Ordnance Survey began.
It’s a short walk from here, across Bath Road and down tree lined suburban streets and a couple of small parades of shops, to the village of Sipson. You wouldn’t necessarily know that it was a separate village today as there isn’t a break in the rows of houses between Bath Road and here. However, the Ordnance Survey map of 1914 shows this as a small settlement surrounded by orchards with Home Farm and the smithy, a post office and the Crown Public House. The great glasshouses and orchards of Sipson Farm spread to the east where now the M4 and the quarry for London Concrete lie. It’s clear, even from walking around today, that it was a delightful English village for centuries. I couldn’t get near enough to the mansion, built for Thomas Wild Jr. when he ran Sipson Farm, to see if it might be worth saving in any future airport expansion as today it appears to be a high security children’s nursery. The village itself is nothing if not picturesque and, let’s be clear about this, it is not picturesque. If Sipson was a dog, you would have already had the conversation with the vet about the last signs you would see which would tell you that it was time to let go. Sipson has been slowly dying over the years and most of what is left appears to have given up. A millennium of village life has crumbled away over the last fifty years or so and there’s not much left to save, now. The most pleasant building still obvious on my walk around Sipson was the King William pub. A sixteenth century pub with a newer arts and crafts inspired frontage added in the 1930s but still with low doors and beams.
Looking at all of these places today, it is little wonder that I am nostalgic for an England I never knew but it seems I am not alone. In the 1920s and 1930s when the frontage was added to the King William, there was a huge nostalgia for a lost England as urbanisation, commercialisation and industrialisation started to take over everyone’s lives. That’s why so many of the houses built between the wars have touches of the Jacobean and the Tudor, everyone was hankering for a Merrie England they’d never known.
That’s a theme that comes through in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England, the story of his trip around the country in 1926. In truth, he’s seeing the very end of an England which was already disappearing under the mock-Tudorbethan suburbs and the roads being built for motor cars like the one he toured in. There was no Heathrow when he passed this way after leaving London. He talks of a pub as the “Place Where London Ends” and of driving down green lanes before seeing the river at Datchet – which is today four miles from the threshold of runway 09 Left. Green lanes you will not find.
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