How Heath Row became Heathrow

1805 - 1822	1897-1909	1920	1945-1946

This brief overview looks at the history of Heathrow and the area on which it was built with the aid of four historical Ordnance Survey maps. In each case the present-day airport (pale pink) and the proposed expansion (pink) have been superimposed.

In January 2009, the Government gave the go-ahead for a third runway and a sixth terminal at Heathrow, already by some distance the world's busiest international airport. This will increase the annual number of flights from 480,000 to 700,000 and will require the demolition of 700 homes in the borough of Hillingdon, including all of the ancient village of Sipson and parts of Harmondsworth and Harlington.

Heathrow’s birth was, by contrast, discreet to the point of invisibility. Indeed, at the outset it wasn’t (ostensibly) planned to be a civil airport at all...

Heathrow Airport derives its name from a hamlet called Heath Row on the western part of what was Hounslow Heath, near what is now Terminal 3. The original Heath Row was demolished during the construction of the airport in the 1940s. The hamlet of Heath Row lay along a road that ran in a southerly direction from near the Magpies Inn on the outskirts of Sipson in the Parish of Harmondsworth.

Extract taken from Old Series  176 - West London (1805 - 1822)

This map was created from Britain's first national mapping project, Ordnance Survey's One-Inch (‘Old Series’) maps which were first published between 1805 and 1874. They have all been carefully scanned, digitally re-projected and enlarged to match the present-day Ordnance Survey Landranger® series.

Map Key


The land Heathrow covers today is in the southern part of the London Borough of Hillingdon although historically it covers two of the ancient Middlesex parishes of Harlington and Harmondsworth. The development of Heathrow has drastically changed the character of the area over the last 50 years and expansion plans continue to threaten the very existence of villages such as Sipson, Harmondsworth, Harlington and Longford.
  

Extract taken from Revised New Series 176 - West London (1897-1909)

Extract taken from Popular Edition  176 - West London (1920)

From late 1942, there was increasing demand from the Air Ministry for a base for the new long-range heavy troop-carrying planes, existing facilities in the south of England being inadequate. After some debate, a slightly boggy area of market-garden farms to the west of Heston Aerodrome was chosen as the site of a wholly new airfield. Construction work began in May 1944 on land originally acquired from the vicar of Harmondsworth. Although the location was ideal, the terrain was not. 100 million gallons of water had to be pumped out of the ponds and the 14 miles of pipes were needed to drain rainwater into a nearby gravel pit. Another task was the clearance and demolition of the hamlet of Heath Row: few other places have become so posthumously famous.

At the time, the Air Ministry’s case must have seemed unanswerable, but doubts exist as to whether there was ever any intention to use Heathrow for military purposes. The fortunes of war were shifting in the Allies’ favour, so making large-scale troop movements by air less likely; whilst the argument for a large new civil aerodrome was clear to those who were considering how post-war Britain might be shaped. Due largely to wartime innovations, aircraft were now far bigger. Commercial air travel before the war was still a novelty – when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain left Heston Aerodrome for the first of his ill-fated meetings with Hitler in 1938 it was the first time he had been in a plane, which caused little comment at the time – but demand seemed likely to increase substantially in the future. The 1930s plan of four small airports around the capital was now inadequate. Instead, the contemporary logic ran, one larger hub was needed which could be purpose-built for the new planes and would be capable of expansion in the future.

The main problem was that any civil project on this scale would have led to protracted planning enquiries and divisive financial wrangles within Whitehall. Using wartime powers to requisition the land offered a far more certain outcome. The then Parliamentary Under-Secretary Harold Balfour later admitted that he had misled the cabinet on this point in order to expedite the process. Were military use the only requirement, many existing RAF bases could have been converted with far less time and effort. Whatever the real motives, Heathrow was allowed to slip into being almost unnoticed, in marked contrast to the glare of publicity which attended many of its later developments. Heathrow would not have been the first project by a national government promoted under the guise of military exigency, and is unlikely to be the last.

In the event this potential conflict of interests and purpose never materialised, for construction was still not complete by the end of the war. The military origins of the project were quietly forgotten and work continued on building what was now unambiguously a civilian airport. This was officially opened in May 1946 with a flight to Buenos Aires via Lisbon, the departing passengers enjoying terminal facilities that consisted of little more than a large tent. At the time, Heathrow’s managers stated, with rare prescience, that it would eventually become the largest airport in the world.

Extract taken from New Popular Edition  (1945)