August is Local History Month on diamond geezer. Over the years I've explored my immediate E3 neighbourhood, walked the length of the River Fleet and climbed to the highest point in every London borough, to name but a few of my engrossing quests. This year I thought I'd track down the surviving milestones along London's former turnpike roads, in a series I'm calling Milestoned.
Turnpike Trusts were set up in an era of stagecoach travel to build and maintain long-distance roads, and the provision of milestones was made compulsory in 1767. Motor traffic helped make them obsolete, but thousands survive in situ across the country, including dozens along some of London's older roads. I've been inspired by my local milestone near Bow Road station, but let's start off out west along the Bath Road, the precursor to the A4. [map][photos]
1Kensington Gore
This is a most impressive start - a decorated iron milestone of 1911 vintage shoved up against the wall of the Royal Geographic Society and watched over by a statue of David Livingstone. We're on the southern edge of Hyde Park, very close to the Royal Albert Hall, immediately opposite the entrance to West Carriage Drive. The A4 doesn't go this way any more, it diverts off down the Brompton Road at Knightsbridge, but the RGS's milestone reminds us that this used to be the most direct route. It's also the most ornate we'll be seeing, featuring the City of Westminster's coat of arms, two pointy fingers and a grubby peeling sticker promoting a Melbourne-based street artist. Different turnpikes used different locations as their zero point, which for the Bath Road was Hyde Park Corner, precisely one mile distant. As for the next town deemed worthy of a mention, forget Hammersmith and Brentford, we are instead nine miles from Hounslow.
1½The Milestone Hotel, Kensington
The 'half' may be somewhat unexpected, but on a busy road close to the centre of the capital it was deemed practical to mark every half mile not just every mile. A ten minute walk has brought us almost to the end of Kensington Gardens, and to a tall elegant building with terracotta flourishes. It started out as a house in 1884, became a hotel in 1922 and of course they called it The Milestone Hotel. The milestone pokes out through the railings, two of which have been removed, helping to provide the classy heritage touch every five star boutique hotel requires. A doorman in a smart green uniform is another must-have, as is a toff-focused restaurant in which the cheapest starter is a bowl of chicken soup for £15. You will not be staying at The Milestone, but it's free to take a peek outside.
3½King Street, Hammersmith
Milestones 2, 2½ and 3 are long gone, which shunts us along to King Street in the centre of Hammersmith. This was the main road west before the flyover arrived, but is now a muted one-way funnel haunted by milling shoppers. Look for the tiny alcove between the Hammersmith Ram and Creams dessert parlour, bang opposite Primark, where the beleaguered milestone is securely hidden behind a brief railing. Not only is it another something-and-a-half, it's also been painted black with white writing, and there really aren't many of these left. Passers-by use the recess as a litter bin, if they even notice it at all.
8London Road, Isleworth
That's been quite a leap, skipping 4 (Hammersmith), 5 (Turnham Green), 6 (Kew Bridge) and 7 (Brentford), and certainly a lot easier to tackle by bus than it would have been by stagecoach. We're now in Isleworth Parish, as the milestone helpfully reminds us, with only a couple of miles to go before reaching Hounslow. The setting is quite suburban, set back in the pavement against a low brick wall and laurel hedge amid a run of semis at the top of Teesdale Avenue. Immediately behind the hedge is a block of flats, probably about 20 years old, appropriately called Milestone Court (No Estate Agent Boards Allowed). The nearby Rose and Crown which would once have served passing travellers closed in 2008, but there is a Tesco Express for those in need of refreshment.
9London Road, Spring Grove
And that's the first time we've had a one mile gap. The intervening mile has led us along London Road from the low 300s to the high 600s, not too far from Hounslow East station and now within the realm of Heston Parish. Right down at the bottom in tiny black letters is the inscription R. J. & J. Barrett London 1834, confirming that this milestone has been a permanent item of street furniture for an extraordinarily long time. It used to be in the middle of the road but was moved to the southern side around the turn of the century so as not to inhibit road traffic. Every single milestone in today's post is on the southern side of the road, which may or may not be a coincidence.
10Bath Road, Hounslow
Ten miles from Hyde Park Corner doesn't quite drop us in the centre of Hounslow but a short walk past Bell Corner, fractionally to the west. Unusually this milestone is a large rectangular stone embedded in a wall, not plonked in the pavement. The wall is an old one, left in situ when the 57-room Cloisters Care Home was built behind it. The stone has a whopping great diagonal crack through it, which may well be why the wall wasn't touched. We're still in Heston Parish, a reminder that Hounslow wasn't always the bigshot local centre of population it is today. It's also time to introduce the next town down the road to be granted milestone headline status, namely Colnbrook, once a major coaching inn hub (now entirely bypassed).
12Bath Road, Cranford
This might be more the kind of thing you thought I'd be writing about - a decrepit stump embedded in the pavement with hard-to-read chiselled lettering. 'London 12' appears on the top sloping face, including a rather jaunty number twelve, whereas distances to Colnbrook and Hounslow face the traffic and have been heavily eroded by time. The precise location is outside the London Heathrow Central Travelodge (which most definitely isn't central) at the foot of a phone mast near the bus shelter. But this is more than 100m away from where the milestone originally started out, which was on the other side of Berkeley Avenue between Joanna's Hair Salon and the VII Indian restaurant. Widening of the Bath Road and/or the redevelopment of Cranford's shopping parade are likely to blame, which just goes to prove you should never trust a milestone because you don't know where it's been.
13Bath Road, Harlington Corner 14Bath Road, Sipson Green
Milestone 13 is still positioned where it used to be, just to the west of Harlington Corner, but its surroundings have changed beyond measure. The adjacent field now houses a BT engineering facility, the Coach & Horses across the road is now a cylindrical Holiday Inn and the northernmost of Heathrow's runways begins a short distance to the south. It's also yet another different design of milestone - taller, indented and with a useful ledge where a weary traveller could rest a coffee cup.
Milestone 14 is similarly designed, and better looked-after. It once sat beside the open road on the corner of an orchard, and now finds itself beside a major road junction where hundreds of vehicles an hour gush out of Heathrow and off the Northern Perimeter Road. Tim Peake welcomes passengers to Heathrow on an adjacent billboard. Guests at the Leonardo Hotel dream of thicker double glazing. And still the airport's edge has one more milestone to deliver...
15Bath Road, Longford
The final surviving milestone on my fifteen mile quest can be found on the edge of the village of Longford, just beyond the junction with the Colnbrook Bypass. It sits amid a leaf-strewn verge next to a huge area of airport parking, just across the road from an architecturally-bereft Premier Inn. Here hotel staff hang around waiting for free shuttle buses to whisk them away, and chauffeurs and Uber drivers park up between jobs for a fag and a chat. A few steps away is the Longford Pump, installed in 1827 by the Colnbrook Turnpike Trust to deal with dust on the road, and lovingly restored by Hillingdon council in 2016. Should Heathrow's third runway ever be built the entire village of Longford is due to be consumed, and along with it the road along which Milestone 15 has stood sentinel all these years.
If milestones are of interest, here are three extraordinarily good resources.
• The Milestone Society Repository "holds extracts of the Society's central records of over 30,000 milestones, boundary markers, fingerposts, crosses, AA Signs and tollhouses throughout the UK and associated reference photographs that can be viewed as maps in Google Earth or spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel or searched on-line."
• Precise locations are visible if you go to osmaps.ordnancesurvey.co.uk, click the Places tab and select Milestones from the menu down the side. This works for anywhere in the country. (n.b. milestones are somewhat outnumbered by boundary markers).
• The Metadyne website, lovingly compiled by Mike Horne, includes a comprehensive illustrated list of all the surving milestones in NW and SW London, and I bow down in awe.
Update: Except I've just followed London's best-milestoned road, so the others are just more of the same but less of it, which means this feature is essentially unsustainable.
