Below Heathrow
- Louise@Gwanwyn
- Sep 30, 2024
- 6 min read
Hundreds of years of harvests were sustained by the land that is now threaded with concrete tunnels and thronged by travellers
Early mornings and overnight travel have long been associated with Heathrow: for centuries, the rich agricultural land that underlies the airfield produced fresh fruit and vegetables that were transported by horse and cart in to central London. Market gardeners
here planted currant bushes below fruit trees - apple, pear, plum, cherry and damson - to maximise production, and regularly left Heathrow with loaded carts at 10pm, so as to arrive when the wholesale market at Covent Garden opened, at 4 am. The dominance of horse-drawn transport in 18th and 19th century London meant that the disposal of manure became a pressing concern: the market gardeners of Heathrow used their return journeys to transport some of this waste, turning a profit and acquiring useful fertiliser at the same time (1).
Though the landscape around Heathrow is no longer dominated by the orchards, market gardens and country lanes that were here 80 years ago, it is still true that Heathrow is a source of fresh produce for London and beyond: fresh food is one of the top-three items (by weight) imported through the terminals (2). 80% of fruit consumed in the UK, and almost 50% of vegetables, are grown elsewhere (3), as our tastes move towards exotic produce that doesn't thrive here, and as land in the UK is increasingly used for growing crops to feed to the 85% of UK farm animals confined to intensive factory farms (4). In some areas of the UK, urbanisation - driven by rising population pressure and land-prices - is another factor in the loss of productive agricultural land, and the development of Heathrow in the last 80 years is a standout example of this trend.
Just to the north of the airport perimeter, several traces of the rural heritage of the Heathrow area can still be discerned. An 18th century public house - The Three Magpies - is tucked in to an enclave at the edge of Bath Road (A4); this is the only one of the coaching inns - once providing a change of horse to long-distance travellers leaving the capital - (1, p. 25) that has avoided demolition.
It now sits, surrounded by modern buildings, in a sea of tarmac. Similarly, to the south of Heathrow’s perimeter, a public house that dates back to the 1630s - The Green Man pub - retains a slice of the old-world charm of Hounslow Heath which is worlds away from the modern road network outside its windows.
Looking north on take off, it’s possible to glimpse a huge barn roof close to a church spire: this is the roof of the medieval Great Barn in Harmondsworth, which was described by Sir John Betjeman as ‘the cathedral of Middlesex’ (5). It was used for agricultural purposes until the 1970s, and is now a Grade 1 listed building.
Given the huge scale of the airport operations here, it can be hard to believe that the first planes that landed in the Heathrow area did so on a grassy area, barely 1 km long! Between 1929 and 1943, a handful of fields were bought by a small aircraft engineering firm - Fairey - who were looking for a site to locate their workshops adjacent to a test runway. Their impact on the area was minimal, and it was only with the compulsory - and controversial - acquisition of the land during World War 2 by the Ministry of Defence that the agricultural nature of the area began to be dismantled (1). In the 1950s, the site was developed as the first civilian airport for London, and expansion has continued almost continuously up until the present day.
Exploring the history of the land on which Heathrow is built through looking at old maps is rather apt: this is the area in which the concept of accurate measurements - to make
Ordnance Survey maps - was first trialled. A semi-buried canon barrel in a small grassy area just to the north of the airport marks the north-western base of an accurate survey begun in 1784 to determine the exact distance between the Greenwich observatory and Paris. The methods piloted during this work (6) were under the guidance of Major General William Roy, whose enthusiasm for accurately surveying the whole of the British Isles came to fruition with the establishment of the Ordnance Survey in 1891, a year after his death. Accurate, modern maps began with the techniques and formulae he implemented, and the further advances of these techniques - GIS and satellite surveys - are an integrated part of modern day life. And essential for the functioning of busy airspace!
Developments around Heathrow over the last 80 or so years have not, of course, occurred in isolation - the pattern of land use changing from agricultural to other purposes is one that is mirrored across much of the UK and Europe in this time frame. But the persistence of the few rural remnants here, against the backdrop of very modern hotels and industrial units, does make the contrast with ‘before’ and ‘after’ rather striking. The sharp edges of new-build hotels against the timbered structures of the old hostelries inevitably leads to reflection on how our human experience has changed. The soil on which a farming community lived, worked and depended is now encapsulated by concrete, which separates it from the (approximately) 128,00 travellers that pass through the Heathrow area each day (7). Many of these visitors must be scarcely conscious of their environs, immersed as they are in the private worlds of their smartphones. As a population, we seem to be further away from a connection with the soil that sustains us than any that have gone before - even as our scientific knowledge progresses. Layers of aircraft fill the sky here, in holding-patterns that spiral outwards from the runways: layers of history - in land that sustained hundreds of years of harvests - is now threaded with concrete tunnels and thronged by people going somewhere else.
Heathrow is a place where our relationship with landscape is brought to the fore: the infrastructure to facilitate our travel totally dominates the land, sky and soundscape here. The novelty we may seek in the world may be at the end of a faraway runway, but equally it may be found closer to home: areas of biodiversity set up by Heathrow near to the airport provide opportunity for wildlife to find refuge in an otherwise very urban setting (8).
Thirteen sites to the west, south and east of the airport, many of which are linked by waterways, give back fragments of the habitats that would have been the domain of many and varied species of bird, mammal and insect in the time when the land here was farmed - and before: it was in 1806 that the heathland to the south of Harmondsworth was 'divided, allotted and inclosed' (9). Though the total of the nature spaces is only around 170 hectares - 14% of the airport's footprint - they nevertheless signal welcome attention to the welfare of species other than our own, at a time when alarming falls in biodiversity are occurring.
In the context of such dramatic decline in our fellow species, the areas for nature set aside in the vicinity of Heathrow are very important, and can make a helpful contribution in enabling people to rediscover the joys and physical benefits to be gained by spending time in nature.
Land in the south east of England is in short supply, and expensive. But perhaps in the future, investment in supporting regenerative farming practices - which sequester carbon and nitrogen in the soil, and build resilience to flooding and drought by enhancing soil
structure (10) - would be an appropriate way to help offset the emissions from activity at the airport. This closure of the 'loop' - facilitating the absorption of greenhouse gases to compensate for those produced by air traffic - would be a modern-day nod to the rich heritage of the land here, where huge tonnages of fresh produce were produced by generations of market-gardeners using only horse manure as fertiliser.
Heathrow is held in so many people's minds as a place where journeys to far away places begin, pass through or end. The 'time travel' achieved by the exploration of the history of this place shows that adventure and discovery of a different type can be accessed without passing through Security. And that alongside consideration of the community of other species that lived in these areas before us, we can hope to find a more climate-stable future for us all.
References:
1 Heathrow - 2000 years of history. Philip Sherwood. Pub. Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1999
9 Article - page 1 - in the Oracle and the Daily Advertiser - Thursday 24th April 1806
10 Dirt to Soil - one family's journey in to regenerative agriculture. Gabe Brown. Pub. 2018.
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