Colnbrook SL3: a Berkshire village behind the Terminal 5 hotels

The full-service Terminal 5 hotel at SL3 0FF is on Poyle Road: a Terminal 5 name with a Berkshire address, five minutes from the gate by road with the Colnbrook lanes starting at the end of the car park. The limited-service Terminal 5 name at SL3 0PH sits on the Old Bath Road, which is the stub of the original road west left behind when the airport swallowed the rest of it.

One of the two budget houses stands on Calder Way, SL3 0AT, and the other is a few minutes off in the village itself. None is grand and none pretends to be. Two of the four have a bar worth sitting in and two do not, and Hester will tell you which is which rather than letting you find out at nine at night. No hotel here has any tie to the desk.

Langley is the nearest railway station, about thirty five minutes on foot, on the Great Western and Elizabeth line routes towards Slough and Reading. Heathrow Terminal 5 station is roughly forty minutes walking, which nobody does. The 81 bus runs along the road towards Slough and Hounslow and is fine if you are not carrying luggage.

In practice everyone here is in a hotel with a car park and never thinks about a train. The women come out by road, an hour from town at worst, or by Piccadilly line to Terminal 5 and a short ride west. The Poyle roundabout can add twenty minutes without warning, which is why Hester builds a margin into these evenings instead of quoting a best case.

The High Street is fifteen minutes end to end and worth the fifteen. The Ostrich Inn has stood here since long before anyone thought of levelling the fields at Heath Row and has a reputation it has done nothing to discourage. The George Inn is halfway along. The brook the village is named for runs under the pavement and out through the gardens behind.

Fifteen minutes is also the honest limit of it. There is no evening here beyond a drink and a walk, and dinner is back at whichever hotel you are in. Say the word to Hester if you would rather not go out at all; roughly half the evenings out here never leave the building and they are no worse for it.

Almost nothing, practically. You are five minutes from Terminal 5, ten from Longford and twelve from the Bath Road. It changes the postcode on your booking form, the council that empties the bins and the fact that a guest who says he is staying in London is technically wrong.

What it does change is the drive in. An hour from central London on a reasonable evening, and rather more when the motorway is shut at junction three. The women leave early for Colnbrook rather than promising an arrival time they would have to apologise for.

Bianka likes meeting near the Ostrich and would rather arrive an hour early than land in your lobby flustered. She asks after your mother, remembers the answer and brings it back an hour later. Molly walks the High Street with her hands in her pockets while the light goes and is unbothered by a changed room, a missed connection or a guest who needs to be asleep by ten.

Anyone from the hall will come out here. Message Hester with the hotel name and your flight time and she will fit the timings around it.

East over the motorway is Terminal 5, five minutes away, and behind it the Heathrow perimeter proper. North east through the lanes, Longford is the first village back inside London. West the road runs to Langley, Slough and Datchet, which are a different sort of evening altogether and a different desk's territory.