In my quest to visit every postcode district in Greater London this year, I'm down to those that only marginally qualify. Today's pair make RM4 in Havering-atte-Bower look easy because both have tiny overlaps. Both are in southwest London because that's where the Twickenham postcode area is, either close or extremely close to Heathrow. TW15 seeps into London only once but TW19 crosses twice so you're about to get three visits for the price of two. I'll write about them in decreasing order of accessibility.[map]
Drive from Feltham to Ashford and there's a point where Ashford Road morphs into Feltham Road, bang on the London/Surrey border, and that's where we're heading. Alight the 117 bus at Field View and you've not gone far enough but alight at the next stop and you've gone too far, because this sliver of TW15 is really thin. It contains just three roads, all of them dead ends and only one of them residential. This means fewer than 30 London houses boast a TW15 postcode, all of them up The Clumps, which is no longer the rustic cluster of villas it once was.
Shield Road leads to the Ashford Industrial Estate, which technically isn't quite in Ashford and which used to be the site of a gravel extraction works. But it has a stripy barrier so you won't be getting up there, whereas Challenge Road only frightens off visitors with signs about CCTV and flytipping. It's somewhere to get your car serviced or windows tinted, including one garage which displays a Christian fish symbol on every possible sign as if this were 2nd century Judea. A lot of the businesses are freight-related so watch out for lumbering lorries, and several are unoccupied and supposedly watched over by guardians. The fence along one side is quite severe because Feltham Young Offenders Institution is on the other side. Thank heavens TW15 also has a nice bit.
Bedfont LakesCountry Park comes in two parts separated by a railway. The northern TW13 chunk is much larger, much better known and seasonally alluring. The southern TW15 chunk is nigh invisible unless you know it's there and entirely inaccessible from the other side because nobody's ever paid for a footbridge. The locked car park and seriously faded signs can't be helping either. Instead squeeze in past the spiky gates to discover a somewhat artificial landscape of scrubby willowy woodland. None of the trees are especially tall and there's a uniformity to their height because they were planted when this area of former gravel pits and landfill was turned over to the public in 1991. It's come on in leaps and bounds since.
Pick from the all weather track or a grassy clearing, perhaps even the perimeter path which lets you graze the edge of Surrey. Look out for the community orchard with its 40 apple trees (including a couple of rare Hounslow Wonders). Sooner rather than later you'll come across an extensive lake because not all the gravel pits got filled in. A set of wooden steps leads down into the water, this being where the Chattern Hill posse go open water swimming in scrupulously organised sessions on Saturday mornings and Tuesday and Thursday evenings. They even have a cabin by the lakeside stocked with floats and a kettle, although it's not for changing because you have to do that outside, plus the lake's temperature is currently 7°C so best bring your own wetsuit.
Bedfont Road runs parallel to Heathrow's Southern Perimeter Road for the best part of a mile, the two kept apart by the Duke of Northumberland's River. One's in London and the other's in Surrey, right up to the triple point where Hillingdon meets Hounslow meets Spelthorne. But the TW6/TW14/TW19 triple point is a bit further east by the roundabout, hence a brief stripe of TW19 makes landfall in the capital and a right unattractive stripe it is too. The chief tenant is Esso's West London Oil Terminal, because however much aviation companies greenwash they can't avoid using silofuls of fuel. The 25 tanks here are fed by a pipeline that runs all the way from Fawley refinery near Southampton and has done since 1972. It's so old and so critical that a 90km replacement pipeline is currently being constructed between SO45 and TW19, a carbon-thumping project which is due to be completed this year. Meanwhile Extinction Rebellion turned up here last April and tried locking themselves to a couple of oil tankers, hence the court injunction now bolted to the entrance which only adds to the general ambience of fckoffness.
Nextdoor is a huge new cargohandling facility which opened last spring and has a roof like a very long bar of Aero chocolate. It's been built by an Emirati company called dnata and services imports for both Virgin Atlantic and Delta Airlines because cohabiting saves money. A heck of a lot of land on this south side of Heathrow has been given over to enabling the transfer of cargo, indeed the neighbouring field could easily be turned into another 50 acres of sprawled warehousing if the economy dictates, but that'd be in TW14 so can be ignored for now.
Greater London continues for about half a mile to the west of Heathrow Airport across a buffer that's almost entirely undeveloped, mainly because of the noise. Much of it forms part of the HeathrowBiodiversitySite, an important ecological zone which the airport often crows about (but which they were perfectly willing to sacrifice to the gods of Runway Three). Only one minor road intrudes, a throwback to the days when a quiet country lane meandered through fields and orchards, and that'd be Spout Lane. Its eastern end is long swallowed by the airport's southern runway and its western end has been severed by a link road to the M25. But Spout Lane North somehow lives on, a scrappy runt it's not at all easy to walk to even though Terminal 5 is very close indeed. I braved two perimeter roads and a dual carriageway just so that I could say I'd been.
One end of Spout Lane North has a few bungalows plus one detached house, in various states of repair. These are the closest homes to the Heathrow flightpath by some margin so you must need to be ultra-resilient to live here. A pillar box has been provided plus a trio of litter bins, not that you'd guess from the state of the verges. One securely locked gate leads to Robb's Nursery and another to Spout Lane Lagoon which is part of the airport's drainage system. And at the other end of the lane is the Heathrow Animal Lounge, an extensive facility owned by a company called Airpets who've been answering the question "how do I relocate my pet internationally?" since 1966. I didn't hear any barking from their Airkennels™, even during the quieter overhead interludes, but I did meet one pampered poodle out for a walk. The extremities of Greater London can be extremely strange.
