Flight Plan: the ground around the runways, read from the Bath Road

Flight Plan is the part of this site that looks out of the window. The rest of it is about companions and evenings; these notes are about the ground those evenings happen on: the Bath Road and its hotels, the villages that were farming here long before the runways, and the lanes behind the hotel row that most guests never set foot in. Which rooms go quiet when the landing runway swaps at three, which postcode brings a car to the right door, where the motorway noise gives out and a village begins, and how an evening is paced when the good tables are all inside hotels.

The first ten notes cover the essentials. There is the airport's own past, from the hamlet of Heath Row to Terminal 5 on the old Perry Oaks ground; the village of Sipson on foot; the covered courtyard kept out of sight inside one of the Bath Road hotels; and the case for taking an airport room on a weekend with no flight at all. The practical notes deal with runway alternation, the four postcodes, walking to a terminal, a block of rooms for a visiting team, and what happens when the M4 makes somebody late.

Every place named in these notes is real, set down as carefully as we can manage and kept to the things that do not change from one season to the next. Menus, room prices and opening times are left out on purpose, because they move faster than any page can follow. No hotel, pub or restaurant mentioned here has a connection with the desk or any idea it has been written about. The only figures you will meet are ours, matching the rates page to the pound: £700 for three hours, £900 for the four hour dinner and £1,800 for a full night, her journey out from town counted inside each, and her fee passed to her by hand at the start of the evening.

Each note names the companions who suit it and the stopover it describes. When the plan is settled, send Hester the hotel, the date and when you would like to begin, and she will reply with names and an arrival time she means to keep. Every woman on the rota is in the hall, and the booking page sets out every step of the exchange from the first message onward.