The whiteness of the font, with its relief figures, has a grubby pink sheen — from generations of supplicating hands that have polished, but not worn away, the curious tableaux. The font dates from the fifteenth century. Beyond the standard Christian iconography, crucifixion and pieta, is a stumpy-legged man in a cowl, brandishing a chisel or poignard. Near his right hand is a large leaf. The suggestion is that this personage is the sculptor, the stone carver working on ecclesiastical tracery. The design incorporates a vine leaf to signal the fact that the donor was a vintner (of whose trade St Martin was the patron saint).
The carver’s chisel, driven into the ground by a raised bone or dildo, marks the spot; the spring from which the Green Way begins.
It was another visit, months later, when I managed to get up into the tower. To see for myself how the land opened out: the path to St Mary’s Church at Harmondsworth. The crop of torpedo graves. The M25 with its constant flickering movement. We had stumbled on an active, but little used, pilgrims’ path. The Avenue. Heading, through a tunnel of pink blossom, towards the motorway and the site of a Benedictine priory at Harmondsworth. The sequestered principality of Heathrow.
The breeze barrelling down the long straight track — a diminishing asphalt tongue — doubled Renchi over. He leant into the wind, tugged on the straps of his rucksack like a skydiver. For the first time, since Shenley, we didn’t need maps. We trusted the ground. Snow-pink excesses of municipal cherry trees. We followed our noses.
Patches of greenery, dog grass, a few trees: they are absorbed into a grander scheme. Isolate one Lombardy pine. Stand still and listen. Outsiders are struck by effects, shifts, that locals walking their animals, or collecting their kids from a fenced-off school, take for granted. There is a mystery at the edge of great conurbations; in the light, in places travellers have passed through for centuries.
West Drayton peters out, estates double-glazed against motorway siroccos; a tangle of tree-named streets (Laurel Lane, Rowan Avenue, The Brambles). Would you fancy ‘The Brambles’ as an address? End of the line. Shuddering from traffic. Fence decorated by tossed paper, ubiquitous scraps of black plastic (burst bin bags from an ecological division of household rubbish).
I’m intoxicated by this path; a squeaky gate takes us on to a footbridge over the hectic M4. The demons are not only answering our questions, they’re shouting each other down in their eagerness to get in on the act. There’s Junction 4, the Heathrow turn-off, with its attendant fear and rage. Primal screams. And the warped rectangle of Junction 4B (M4). The infamous Junction 15 of the M25. A cat’s cradle of underpasses and flyovers, impossible decisions.
Our footbridge is a stopped wave. The sky, this morning, is dull and anxious; a dirty scum of cloud into which lamp standards twist their necks, in a feeding frenzy. Beyond the small lake, the tree line of Harmondsworth, planes are coming into Heathrow; a procession of them, drifting in slow motion, like thistledown over yellow fields.
Renchi squats on his heels, meditating. The footbridge trembles and vibrates. If it ran across the Thames between St Paul’s and the Tate Modern, they’d close it down. The West Drayton bridge isn’t a tourist attraction, not yet. It ought to be. All the powers and thrones and dominions of transport are here, angelic orders of diesel, jet fuel, crop spray, animal and human shit. Burial grounds of lost villages. The Perry Oaks Sludge Disposal Works.
The pond’s surface is choppy. You can imagine fat-bellied planes blown backwards. ‘Billy & Mary’ have scratched a Unionist courtship poem into the metallic handrail of the bridge. A sponsored artist has laid out a giant’s causeway of limestone rocks in an incomplete maze; an arrangement that sustains the Hegira, the secret track. Good agricultural land skirting grey water. The continuing alignment of filed-and-forgotten churches.
The account of how the Air Ministry (Civil Aviation Authority) acquired this land, as told by Philip Sherwood in The History of Heathrow (revised edition, 1993), comes to life as we move in on the erased village. It’s not just nostalgia, the loss of market gardens, farms, cottages and coaching inn. Such things have their time and are doomed to removal (as images) into local history archives — which will themselves be rationalised and dumped. Heathrow, one of a chain of small settlements to the west of Hounslow Heath, is a site with a pedigree as old or older than London itself. (Renchi and I, on our walk around the City walls, finished in the Museum of London, where one of the better exhibits featured an Iron Age village; a cluster of huts that dissolved, as you looked at them, into an aircraft taxiing on to the runway. Rub your eyes and thatched huts break through the tarmac. Neither description is definitive; one state of consciousness bleeds continually into another.)
Sherwood’s History opens with an ‘aerial view of Heathrow in 1935’. What appears to be a road choked with traffic is revealed, under magnification, as a dense hedgerow. Prime agricultural land, divided into rectangles, squares and strips, on the edge of an unseen city. The field where London Airport was to be built, in an era before crop circle frenzy, is loud with evidence of previous settlement; a square within a square, a deep ditch, secondary paths that confirm Stukeley’s 1723 drawing of ‘Caesar’s Camp’.
Stukeley’s three figures (their chains, their cloaked supervisor) anticipate the choice of this ground as a suitable location for General Roy’s establishment of a baseline of accurately measured length — which would act as the prelude to a trigonometrical survey of Great Britain. Roy spoke of ‘the extraordinary levelness of the surface’. The line was drawn, with some annoyance from coach traffic, on the ‘Great Road’ (Hounslow to Staines), between King’s Arbour at Heathrow and the Poor House at Hampton Court, a distance of five miles. Surveyors discovered that the spire of the church at Banstead in Surrey was ‘dead in line with the two ends of the base’. The work was undertaken in June and July 1784.
The terminals of the baseline were marked with wooden pipes and wagon wheels set in the ground; by 1791 these decayed and were replaced by upturned cannon. A plaque at King’s Arbour records the event. The distance, as measured by Roy, was 27404.01 feet. Captain Mudge repeated the exercise: 27404.24 feet. Finally, the Ordnance Survey Standard, as determined by Clarke, was declared at 27406.19 feet. From a pleasant suburban stroll through market gardens, heathland, river valley, the triangulation of Britain and the construction of ‘a complete and accurate map’ was begun.
Common land, which Cobbett in his Rural Rides (1853) found to be nothing but ‘nasty strong dirt upon a bed of gravel… a sample of all that is bad and villainous’, had once, thanks to abundant sources of manure (human and animal), been fertile and productive. Wagons taking produce into London returned with a ballast of horse dung.
What happened, in 1943, when the Air Ministry began to evict the people of Heathrow, to tear down farms and cottages, can be interpreted as a standard Orwellian exercise: obfuscation, emollient lies, bureaucratic steamroller, oblivion. Philip Sherwood, searching Air Ministry cabinets for photographic material to illustrate his history, stumbled on files dealing with the development and compulsory purchase of land (under wartime regulations).
Sherwood writes:
The claim has always been made that Heathrow was developed as a result of an urgent need for the RAF to have a bomber base in the London area. The files in the PRO show that there never was such a need and the airfield was regarded from the start as being a civil airport for London. The War Cabinet was deceived into giving approval for the development… The Defence of the Realm Act 1939 was used by the Air Ministry to requisition land and to circumvent the public enquiry that would otherwise have had to be held.