Another Saturday, another significant station birthday. This time it's a 50th birthday and it's on the Underground, the anniversary station being Hatton Cross.
Saturday 19th July 1975 was ALSO the day a brand newrollingstock was introduced on the Piccadilly line, freshly fitted out with additional luggage space. The first such train made the inaugural public journey into Hatton Cross around 10am, and may well roll in again today 50 years later because TfL still haven't managed to introduce a replacement. I don't think any significant celebrations are planned.
Before 1975 the Piccadilly line terminated at Hounslow West but a drive to serve Heathrow Airport saw a sequential extension introduced, initially just to Hatton Cross and then in 1977 to Heathrow Central. Here's a poster from the time and here's the customerleaflet, both sides. Hatton Cross station was to serve "the maintenance areas on the south side of the airport and the large housing districts of North Feltham and Bedfont". Meanwhile "passengers for airlines and spectators" were urged to continue to alight at a remodelled Hounslow West and take the A1 Express bus from the station forecourt.
Being of mid-70s vintage, Hatton Cross has a certain brutalist aesthetic, or if you're feeling less polite looks like a concrete bunker. Its flat roof is because it was once meant to have a car park on top until the airport decided that might be a distraction to incoming planes, which do admittedly come into land incrediblyclose by. Look more closely and the ripples on the slabs round the perimeter of the roof are actually art, a concrete frieze by William Mitchell, although the artworks most people are aware of are the gorgeous mosaics down on the island platform.
Several of the tiled columns feature three stylised birds in flight, the 'Speedbird' motif of Imperial Airways/BOAC, gloriously picked out in blue against an orange background. If waiting for a train, perhaps changing for a looper to Terminal 4, they always brighten the soul. Meanwhile the roof is made from corrugated metal, the floor comprises panels of multicoloured terrazzo and the larger wall tiles are in shades of off-grey and subdued green. Note also the illuminated roundels, these now found only here and at Pimlico which had opened three years earlier. As a time capsule of mid-Seventies design the tube has no finer example.
Climb thestairs - Hatton Cross being the youngest tube station not to have lifts - and you reach a broad funnelling concourse. Beyond is a covered waiting area brightened by a glass lantern and several hanging baskets, where global travellers mingle with airport staff and perhaps take the opportunity for a nap. The shop unit still trades, although the name Newscafe is plainly out of date and they probably now sell more bottles and cans than anything else. The doors to the booking hall were originally operated by treadpads and opened automatically, which was proper cutting edge, but those to the bus station are more annoying as they all need pushing and one alas is full-on defective.
Hatton Cross got a spruce-up last year including the addition of vinyl artworks across many of the ground floor windows. The upper frieze features the Speedbird motif amidst a burst of colour, echoing back to designs downstairs, while below are Himalayan blue poppies and Shirui lilies, two species discovered by Frank Kingdon-Ward who once had a nursery close by. At the same time a so-called Energy Garden was added in the flowerbeds round the back and a few tubs out front. It looked dazzling in Ian Visits' initial report but the current reality is scrappy green plants in need of watering, so at best that means I missed their spring flowering but more likely suggests it's no longer getting the attention it deserves.
The station sits amid an oppressive urban environment with a major dual carriageway on one side and Britain's largest airport on the other. But look more carefully amid the sheds and hotels and the remnants of something older linger, because all of this has been built right on top of what was once a small quiet Middlesex village, a cluster offarms and cottages around a loop of country lanes, large enough for a pub and chapel but not a church or shop, surrounded by many acres of market gardening. Its misfortune is that in 1925 the Great South West Road was aligned straight through the middle, then brutallywidened ten years later, and where the village got lucky is that when London Airport expanded it got no further than the A30, thus a few scraps of Hatton remain to the south of the main road.
If it helps you to orientate, the centre of Hatton is now occupied by the screamingly blue Atrium hotel, where you should never book an overnight room if it's Runway Alternation Week One. The older house across the road with all the vans round the back was originally called The Orchard while the feeder road outside, now Dick Turpin Way, follows the alignment of a brief back lane. A tad more of Steam Farm Lane survives, now somewhere taxis and coaches park up during pauses between airport transfers. The boarded-off hall here was originally Hatton Mission Chapel, an outpost of St Mary's East Bedfont whose vicar travelled by horse and cart to hold a service on Sunday afternoons, and which finally closed in 1992 for fear of fallen roof tiles.
Behind was Hatton Farm, largest of the local farmsteads, one of whose many barns survives as a timber ruin amid a scrappy paddock. Horses are still kept here and in other nearby fields, even those containing airport landing lights, because equine residents tend not to complain about aircraft noise. And a short distance down Bedfont Road, a smidge beyond the car wash, are six old cottages still on their original Hatton footprint. It seems amiss to see an 1836 plaque on the front of the pebbledashed pair, unless perhaps they replaced something older, but the two teetering right on the edge of the flightpath look much more convincingly Victorian.
Hatton's oldest surviving building by far is The Green Man pub, allegedly Jacobean although its listing only reckons 18th century. It's a lovely higgledy building, formerly thatched, whose stables contain a highwayman's hide built into the open back of the chimney, now a feature in the Lounge Bar. If you're ever waiting a long time for a flight it looks a better place to enjoy chicken, chips and a pint than forking out for something fussier airside. For an even cheaper meal try Super Singh's, a no-frills cafe in a blue and white shed on Faggs Lane specialising in vegan pizza and eggless cakes. As for the business park across the road this replaced an extensive Catholic orphanage, the St Anthony's Home, which packed its dormitories tight but fled the area in 1962.
Close by is Hatton's only 20th century residential street, a cul-de-sac of houses and bungalows looped round a patch of parched grass called Hatton Green. In this brief enclave of neat hedged gardens and satellite dishes you could be anywhere in outer London, at least if you visit like I did during the half of the day when planes aren't thundering over. The penalties for living here are obvious but the benefits include a free parking space many visitors to Heathrow would kill for, plus the gift of a tube station a short walk away. It may have been built for the airport but it unintentionally best serves the village Heathrow half-destroyed, by the busy crossroads known as Hatton Cross.
