Wending Through History
The villages around Heathrow have been blighted since 1946 as successive governments have procrastinated and made bad decisions about expanding the airport. These former rural agricultural villages have been fighting airport expansion for eighty years, meanwhile the Grade II listed buildings have deteriorated and the community are exhausted by years of protest.
The Kings Head later called The Peggy Bedford is a Grade II listed Elizabethan building in Longford, Middlesex, that was a major coaching inn on the Bath Road (A4) for centuries. Now blighted by the prospect of the whole village being demolished under the Heathrow expansion plans, it lies, empty and derelict and on the At Risk register.
Mercury House the art deco HQ of Fairey Aviation Limited, Hayes, Middlesex
The Three Magpies pub and the pre-Olympic movement.
The Three Magpies is the last surviving building of the hamlet of Heathrow. It has a fascinating 300 year-old history from highwaymen to map-makers, and from athletics to Royal Hunts. This blog tells the story of some of its Landlords.
The Kings Arms in Longford, Middlesex, has just closed for good. This is the story of 250 years of history about this former coaching inn.
The Bath Road milestones measuring the distance from Hyde Park Corner are still in place today.
The Longford River is a twelve-mile long artificial river built by Charles I. It stretches from Longford in Middlesex to Hampton Court. Now in danger of being partially hidden in a culvert if the Third Runway is built at Heathrow.
On the night of 23 February 1781 Joseph Pierce, the tollhouse keeper, heard a noise in the tollbooth and went to investigate. At two in the morning a butcher from Windsor, with another traveller, entered the toll-house to pay their turnpike toll and found the keeper badly injured on the floor, covered in blood, and dying. His head appeared to have been caved in from the use of a blood-covered poker that lay nearby and there was a large pool of blood around his body. It was later found that twelve pounds had been stolen.
The Hunt family owned Heathrow Farm (now under Terminal 3), they were also tenants of Manor Farm Harmondsworth. At one time they were the dominant farming family in Harmondworth.
