Harold Balfour (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Air between 1938 and 1944) is breathtaking in his arrogance. Sherwood quotes a 1973 autobiography. Balfour, by then, was Lord Balfour of Inchrye. ‘Almost the last thing I did in the Air Ministry of any importance was to hi-jack for Civil Aviation land on which London Airport stands under the noses of resistant Ministerial colleagues. If hi-jack is too strong a word I plead guilty to the lesser crime of deceiving a cabinet Committee.’
Emergency wartime powers were used to establish, by a network of dubious commercial deals, a major airport that was only fifteen miles from the centre of London. Much follows from the original deception. It was suggested that an airstrip had to be laid out for the transportation of troops to the Far East, when it was known that this would never be necessary and that, in any case, there were other airfields that could quite easily undertake the operation.
‘We took the land,’ Balfour boasts. ‘Hiroshima killed Phase Two (troop transport). London Airport stands.’
To the innocent, those who prefer to believe that government is always right, there is nothing very shocking in this fix. It worked. An unimportant village disappeared. Fairey Aviation, who had run an aerodrome on the chosen site, were put out of business. Bullying letters with official stamps. Compensation boards that moved with Kafkaesque torpidity. The English way. Perimeter land was tolerated for several very clear purposes: to stack the mentally inadequate, to build golf courses, to board cats and dogs, to hide toxic industries, to dump landfill and to provide bunkers, research stations and safe houses for the Secret State.
The chicanery that converted a convenient strip of ground into the madness of Europe’s busiest airport was an unexceptional piece of business. It had all happened before, in London, when the railway stations were built. Now it was the turn of the complacent country folk who got their living from trade with the city. Whingeing yokels. Serial sentimentalists. Couldn’t they appreciate the economic benefits, the cultural connections? American hotels with room service and mini-bars, instead of crusty old coaching inns.
Perhaps the original planners had an instinct for the sacred geometry of Heathrow. Measurement and surveying were always the metaphors. Three men linked by chains. A ditched field. The pattern of early settlement revealed by aerial photography. A temple of the stars.
The brick and flint church of St Mary in Harmondsworth is notable for its Norman doorway. The church, of course, is locked. But the famous tithe barn, restored, pretty much cased in perspex, is still on show: HARMONDSWORTH INVESTMENTS, XYPLEX. Neat gravel drive. Fake gas lamp standards. Coach house as office. Tall yew hedge. The corporate spread of Surrey demands its heritage tokens. Efficiency and pedigree: old but clean. Air-conditioned Elizabethan. Tithe barn with IT power lines. Miss Marple’s church and pub and village green: ten minutes from an international airport.
The Green Way slants across a recreation ground at the precise angle that keeps it in parallel with the M25. I’ll forgive Balfour all his machinations for leaving us with this definitively unresolved track between worlds, topographies. To our left — kill the scream of the jumbos — is a swoop of green; a lush crop contained by low-level industrial units, the Heathrow sliproad. A curving chainlink fence with the obligatory paraphernalia: photo-voltaic scanners, surveillance towers, radio masts. We’re in the sound spiral of the flight path, the drone of traffic. We’re on camera, obviously, the only figures in a wide-sky landscape. There are no tall buildings, nothing that might knock the wheels from a Boeing.
When our path abandons us, without warning, on the A4 (the Colnbrook Bypass), it’s disorientating. This is flags-of-all-nations hotel territory: Sheraton, Heathrow Park (aka Alamo). Stars and stripes on the highest pole. People (J.G. Ballard, Jean-Luc Godard) have discovered eroticism in the conjunction of hotel and airport. This, I suppose, would be the ‘rubber insulated sex’ that the judge at the first Archer trial found so distasteful. Anonymity. Processing plants through which faceless couples pass without leaving a trace. A sound-baffled cell. A power shower. Neutral ground. Oblique glimpses, through gauze, of aircraft on the runway.
The concessionary buses (‘Courtesy Service’) that shuttle customers into the Alamo look like ambulances. German transport to an American hotel. A hard road to cross.
Pulling west, down a vestigial trace of the old Bath Road, we recover a taste of what was lost when Heathrow (the village) turned into landfill. A run of deep-England gardens, thatched wishing wells, early season blooms, determined to ignore the incursions of an international airport. This is a notion as perverse as Derek Jarman’s rock garden in the lee of the nuclear power station, the off-channel gales of Dungeness. Windows shudder, tiles are threatened. Any day now a brick of frozen shit, a lump of aircraft debris, a falling asylum seeker, will crash through the roof. But, with leaded panes, net curtains, white doors, beds of hardy perennials, carpet-sized lawns, the rustic fantasy thrives. You can’t hear yourself speak, the flow of traffic is continuous and agitated. The quirkily local is asserted in the teeth of the architectural Esperanto of Heathrow’s expanding purlieus.
On a bridge over a tributary of the Colne, stamped with a brightly gilded crown from the reign of William IV (1834), we watch an airbus skid over the protective fence of the Western Perimeter Road. Heathrow is its own city, a Vatican of the western suburbs. London flatters itself in insisting on the connection. The airport complex with its international hotels, storage facilities, semi-private roads, is as detached from the shabby entropy of the metropolis as is the City, the original walled settlement. They have their own rules, their own security forces, the arrogance of global capitalism. They service Moloch in whatever form he chooses to reveal himself; they facilitate drug/armament, blood/oil economies.
Negotiating Stanwell Moor Road, with the Colne and the elevated M25 to our right, we hit one of those passages where the Green Way is swallowed and overridden by furiously competing narratives. Dwarfish lighting poles, bright yellow cruciform structures (flight-path indicators) in roadside fields. Planes coming in at various heights. The vibrations shake our skeletons, loosen fillings. The madness of this pilgrimage through a landscape that challenges or defies walkers is a pure adrenalin rush. At the big roundabout, the blue and white sign — M25 — is a holy relic on our Milky Way. Renchi, resting at the verge, cross-legged, hood up, contemplates the vortex: planes, vans, airport buses. Tremendous discriminations of noise.
If you want a severed community (cut off and proud of it), try Stanwellmoor. Airport access roads on two sides, M25 and King George VI Reservoir on the others. Rabbit killers, poachers, dealers in whatever can be shaken loose from Heathrow (definitively misdirected luggage), Stanwellmoor has them all. Living in an easygoing, freebooters’ paradise, under the flight path; under the tons of stored water. I like what there is of it, a couple of dozen houses and two pubs. The first is open, but won’t feed us.
‘Do you do food?’
‘Yes, but not this week. Kitchen’s closed.’
We plod on. At the roadside, in a wire cage, is a notable collection of broken plaster statuary: praying hands, decapitated madonnas, oyster shells, tortoises. Renchi fishes out a draped, classical figure — Minerva? — and poses, his large bearded face in place of her missing head. The white of the plaster has worn away, revealing runs of terracotta that look like roadkill. I dip for trophies, shoving a few amputated limbs in my rucksack for replanting in Hackney.