A row of houses at the edge of the heath
Heath Row was never a village. It was a hamlet in the parish of Harmondsworth: a line of farmhouses and cottages strung along a lane on the western edge of Hounslow Heath, which is all the name ever meant. It lay somewhere under the middle of today's airport, between the two runways, and for most of its history it was a place nobody outside the parish had any reason to think about at all.
The land around it was some of the best in Middlesex for growing things. The soil on this flat stretch west of London is deep and easily worked, and for generations the farms of Heath Row, Sipson, Harlington and Harmondsworth fed the capital: orchards and market gardens, fruit and vegetables going east by cart and later by lorry to the London markets. The Bath Road ran along the north, carrying coaches west, and the heath to the east had the reputation for highwaymen that every heath near London seemed to acquire.
A measured line across the heath
Heath Row made its one appearance in the history books before the aircraft came for a scientific reason. In 1784 General William Roy measured a baseline across Hounslow Heath, a dead straight line of about five miles from King's Arbour, near Heath Row, south to Hampton. It was measured with extraordinary care, and it became the foundation of the triangulation of Britain that grew into the Ordnance Survey.
Both ends were later marked with old cannons set upright in the ground, and the northern one is still there, inside the airport on its north side, a short way from the hotel row. It is an odd thing to come across: a gun barrel standing on end beside an airport road, marking the spot where the modern mapping of the country began. Almost nobody sleeping on the Bath Road knows it is there, and it is one of the better pieces of trivia to produce over dinner.
Fairey's grass aerodrome, and 1944
Aviation arrived quietly. In 1930 the Fairey Aviation Company opened a private airfield on farmland near Heath Row, the Great West Aerodrome, where it could test and show its aircraft on a field of its own. It was grass, with hangars and a modest staff, and for fourteen years that was the whole of the flying there: test pilots, company aircraft and the occasional visitor, with the orchards carrying on round the edges.
In 1944 the Air Ministry requisitioned the land under wartime powers for a large transport airfield. Fairey lost the aerodrome, and the hamlet of Heath Row, its farms and its cottages were cleared for runways. Before the earth moving began, the archaeologist W. F. Grimes excavated part of the site and found an Iron Age settlement with what he read as a temple, a reminder that people had lived on this gravel for a very long time before anybody thought of flying from it.
London Airport, then Heathrow
The war ended before the airfield was finished, and it passed to civil aviation instead. It opened as London Airport at the start of 1946, its first departure bound for South America, and for the early years the passenger terminal was a collection of ex military marquees and prefabricated huts on the north side, along the Bath Road. Passengers waited in tents with a runway in front of them and the old coaching road behind.
The permanent buildings went up in the middle of the field in the 1950s, reached by the tunnel under the northern runway, and in 1966 the airport took the name Heathrow, after the hamlet it had replaced. By then there was nothing of Heath Row left to see. What remained was the word, printed on luggage tags all over the world and attached to a place that most people who say it assume was always an airport.
Perry Oaks and the western end
West of the old hamlet lay Perry Oaks, farmland that went a different way. In the 1930s it became the site of a large sewage sludge works, and it stayed that way, hemmed in by the growing airport, for most of the century. When a fifth terminal was proposed on the site, the public inquiry that followed ran for years and became the longest in British planning history, and the terminal did not open until 2008.
Building Terminal 5 meant moving two rivers, the Longford River, cut in the 1630s for Charles I to feed the gardens at Hampton Court, and the Duke of Northumberland's River, into new channels along the western edge of the airport. The excavation that preceded construction was among the largest ever carried out in Britain, and under the old sludge beds it found thousands of years of fields, boundaries and settlements. The western end has been farmed, dug, flooded and built on, and it is still giving up its history.
What still gives it away
Nothing of Heath Row itself stands, but its neighbours do, and they tell you what it was like. At Harmondsworth the great barn built for Winchester College in the fifteenth century is still there within earshot of the northern runway, with the village church and old houses round it. At Longford the cottages beside the stream are older than the airport by centuries. Sipson keeps the lanes of a farming village, and at Harlington the parish church still has its Norman doorway.
The Bath Road is the other survivor. Its line is the old road west, and at least one of the pubs on its north side is older than the airport by a very long way; a garden that now faces the perimeter fence once looked out over open fields. Stand on the pavement at dusk with the arrivals coming over and it takes very little imagination to take away the fence, the lights and the terminals, and see a lane of farmhouses at the edge of a heath.
A long layover on the old ground
Twelve hours between flights is too long for a terminal and too short for London, and the old ground round the airport is one of the better answers to it. A car to Harmondsworth for the barn on a day it opens, a walk through Longford, a long lunch somewhere with a garden and back to the gate unhurried: long layovers and longer stays are arranged for exactly that kind of day. They start at a full night's length, £1,800, and build upward from the same published rungs, her travel out from town counted inside.
Patricia reads the kind of history that comes with footnotes and thinks every guest should see the Harmondsworth barn once. Tina keeps a notebook of every airport she has ever passed through and will want to know what you make of this one; she is on the petite tag. Stacy studies architecture in her own time and has views on every terminal building put up since the marquees came down. For the village closest in spirit to the old hamlet, Sipson on foot is the companion piece, and the whole rota is in the hall.
Filed under: most of the names in this piece also sit under brunettes in the by tag.