The Bath Road hotel strip, from Harlington Corner to the Longford turn

Coming from Harlington Corner you meet the four-star at the Hayes end of the road first, with the longest bar on the strip and a lobby that swallows noise. Then the middle one of the three big houses, whose bar sits back from the entrance so you are not watching luggage roll past your table, and after it the one that hides a covered courtyard in the middle of a building that looks like nothing at all from the kerb.

Further west the house at TW6 2AQ stands behind its screen of trees with the northern runway at its back. Then the strip thins out, the hedges take over and a third Terminal 5 name, out at the Longford end, marks the far edge of the road.

From most of this row the central terminals are ten minutes by road. Terminal 5 is further than it looks from the tree-screened house, and further again from the long-barred one at the Hayes end. No hotel on this road is a partner of ours and none needs to be. She arrives as a guest, the same as anybody else walking in out of the wind.

Hayes and Harlington, on the Elizabeth line, is about twenty five minutes on foot from the eastern end of the strip. Heathrow Terminals 2 and 3 station is roughly thirty minutes walking, and Terminal 5 thirty five. Those are real walking times along a road with a hedge on one side and no reason to be on foot.

In practice nobody walks them. The hotel buses run along the front of the row, the airport transfer coaches stop at most of the doors, and a car covers the whole strip in under ten minutes. The women come out by road in the evening and by Elizabeth line to Hayes and Harlington when the motorway has gone wrong, then a short ride west.

Honest version: there is nowhere to go. Two or three of these hotel restaurants are genuinely good and the rest feed people who have somewhere to be at six in the morning. The pubs on the north side are for the hour before dinner, not the evening itself. The Three Magpies has a garden facing the perimeter fence and the arrivals come over it low enough to stop a sentence halfway through, which is worth doing once.

What the Bath Road gives you instead of choice is time. No table held for ninety minutes, no traffic to fight, nothing to leave for. Evenings here run longer than town evenings because there is no reason on earth for them to end early.

People with an early flight and a whole evening to fill. Consultants on a Tuesday to Thursday pattern who sleep here rather than in a city hotel because the client is at Stockley Park. Crew on a long stopover. And a particular kind of guest who books a runway facing room deliberately, keeps the curtains open and finds the approach lights better company than the television.

Bookings here skew long. Three hours is common, the four hour dinner length more so, and overnights turn up whenever the outbound flight is late enough to make a slow morning possible.

Angelika starts at the Three Magpies when the light allows and can name an aircraft by the sound of it. Michelle knows every entrance from Harlington Corner to the Longford turn and picks the Skyline courtyard more often than not. Tiffany works the hour after the day guests leave, when the lobbies change character, and she is the name Hester suggests to anyone who admits to being nervous.

Any of the women in the hall will come to the strip on the same terms. Give Hester a hotel name and she will say who is free.

East of Harlington Corner the road runs into Harlington proper and then on towards Cranford and the Hounslow side. Behind the hotels to the north, Sipson begins two hundred metres off the tarmac and goes quiet almost immediately. Keep west and you reach Longford, which is four streets and a stream. Across the fence to the south are the central terminals, and the whole ring is described on the perimeter page.