Chapter Eleven
Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3
The Village Beneath the Runways
Why is Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3 called Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3?
In brief: Heathrow preserves the name of the older hamlet of Heathrow, absorbed by the airport. The station’s terminal numbers identify the airport buildings it serves.
Transport context: London Underground and Elizabeth line station.
In 1944, Heathrow is still a place from which a person can leave.
There is a road. There are farms, cottages, a mission hall and a public house called the Plough and Harrow. There are ponds among the trees. At Heathrow Hall, sheep, pigs and cattle occupy the yard; across the road, kingfishers work the water. The Wild family has farmed in the parish for more than three hundred years. Children know the hedges, the ditches and the shallow places where they can paddle.
Then the orders come.
The government requires the land for an airfield. Residents are evicted. Houses are demolished. Roads that have served the fields are cut or absorbed. A river channel is diverted. The geometry of the runway passes over the older, less obedient geometry of lanes, orchards, farms and water.1
Within two years, Heathrow will become a place from which the world departs.
The village must disappear before its name can become famous.
Heathrow is not, at first, one concentrated settlement. It is a straggle of habitation extending south from the Bath Road towards Perry Oaks, on the western edge of Hounslow Heath. The name is generally read as a description of the landscape: a row at the heath. It belongs to a place that is neither London nor quite beyond London, rural but close to the old western road, where the capital loosens into Middlesex.2
This is not waste ground waiting to be useful.
By the early twentieth century, the country around Harmondsworth is one of west Middlesex’s centres of market gardening. In 1901 the census records at least twenty market gardeners and 120 labourers. Strawberries are a principal crop, carried east towards London by the Great Western Railway. Farms also grow cabbages, leeks, potatoes, kale, marrows and spinach. The city eats the countryside before it builds over it.3
Heathrow itself retains more mixed farming than some neighbouring districts. Trees and hedges remain around the fields. Farmhouses stand apart from one another along the road. There are barns, orchards, ponds and broad verges bright with wild flowers. The village is small enough for its public house to be singular: not a Plough and Harrow, but the Plough and Harrow.
Its obscurity is part of its value.
A place can remain peaceful because powerful people have not yet found the use for its flatness.
They begin finding it long before the aeroplane.
In 1784, Major General William Roy comes to Hounslow Heath with glass rods, trestles and an ambition to measure accurately. He needs a baseline for a survey connecting the observatories at Greenwich and Paris. The ground must be sufficiently level for a measurement extending more than five miles. Roy’s men align the rods with extreme care and move them forward, one after another, more than a thousand times.4
The north-western end of the line lies close to what will become Heathrow. It is marked by a cannon set vertically into the earth, its muzzle pointing upwards. The cannon survives near the airport’s northern perimeter.
Before this ground helps London fly, it helps Britain map itself.
The connection is not mystical. Surveyors and aviators are attracted by the same fact. The land is flat.
In 1925, the test pilot Norman MacMillan makes an emergency landing here. He sees fields used largely for market gardening, close to London and level enough for aircraft. He recommends the location to the aircraft designer and industrialist Richard Fairey.5
Fairey has a factory at Hayes but needs somewhere to assemble and test his machines. In 1930 he pays the Vicar of Harmondsworth £15,000 for 150 acres and establishes the Great West Aerodrome. It has one grass runway and a scattering of practical buildings. Aircraft now rise from fields that continue to be farmed around them.6
For a time the two worlds coexist.
A pilot can land near cattle. A farmhouse stands opposite the aerodrome. The villagers hear engines, but an engine is not yet the permanent weather of the place. The airfield is one occupation among others, not the fact to which everything else must submit.
War changes the scale.
By 1944 the government is considering how London will connect with the world after the fighting ends, even while the fighting continues. Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan considers a ring of airports and the need for a large western site. Heath Row lies about twelve miles from central London, away from the industrial smoke of the east, with good drainage and access from the Great West Road. Fairey’s aerodrome has already demonstrated what the land can do.7
Wartime powers remove the delays that ordinary acquisition would bring. The official requirement is for an RAF base capable of sending long-range troop-carrying aircraft towards the Far East. The Great West Aerodrome and the surrounding farms are requisitioned. Construction begins on broad concrete runways arranged for changes in wind. Heath Row lies in their way.8
A map makes the operation appear clean.
Here is the runway. Here is the perimeter. Here is the land required.
On the ground, David Wild, his wife Naomi and their children leave Shrub End. Their house is demolished. The family has worked land in the parish for centuries, but antiquity is not a defence against an emergency order. Heathrow Hall comes down. The Plough and Harrow comes down. Farms, cottages and ponds vanish beneath clearance works. John Wild writes a lament for the village, predicting that hedges, trees and wayside flowers will be gone and that Heathrow will survive only in memory.9
He is wrong about one thing.
The name will survive almost everywhere except the place itself.
As the village is removed, an older settlement appears beneath it. Archaeological work reveals an Iron Age enclosure known as Caesar’s Camp, although Caesar has no demonstrated claim upon it. Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age objects emerge from the soil. Decades later, excavation before the construction of Terminal 5 will recover around 80,000 artefacts spanning some nine thousand years.10
Heathrow repeatedly performs this trick. It destroys a landscape and discovers another underneath.
The war ends before the projected RAF base is required for its original purpose. The runways, however, are too extensive and too strategically placed to abandon. On 1 January 1946 the site is handed over for civil aviation as London Airport.
That same day, a converted Lancaster bomber named Starlight lifts from the new airfield carrying passengers towards Buenos Aires. The journey takes more than thirty-five hours.11
There is grandeur in the destination and austerity in the departure.
The Village Made of Canvas
A passenger at the new London Airport does not enter a terminal in the modern sense.
There is no marble concourse, no moving walkway, no wall of glass. Along the Bath Road stand former military marquees arranged into what the airport calls its tented village.12
Inside, someone has tried to make impermanence respectable. Floral-patterned armchairs and settees stand beneath canvas. Small tables carry vases of fresh flowers. The furnishings suggest a suburban sitting room that has been asked, without adequate notice, to conduct international aviation.
There is no heating.
In winter the marquees are bitterly cold. In summer their walls can be removed to admit a breeze. Outside, the airfield is mud. Wooden duckboards provide a narrow route from domestic comfort to the waiting aircraft, protecting shoes if not dignity.12
The phrase tented village is almost too perfect.
Only months earlier, a real village had occupied the ground: houses with hearths, farms with names, a public house, ponds, hedges and families who knew where the path became wet after rain. That village was demolished. In its place, the airport builds canvas rooms, places flowers on the tables and borrows the language of community.
The contrast is not evidence of deliberate cruelty. It is more revealing than that. Institutions create cheerful names for temporary inconvenience because the future must be made to feel hospitable. Passengers are invited to see pioneering charm. The dispossessed see what the charm has replaced.
The first Heathrow is therefore both less and more modern than the airport that follows. Its aircraft cross continents. Its passengers reach them by walking over planks through mud.
The future arrives in increasing numbers.
In the airport’s first operational year, 63,000 passengers pass through it. By 1951 there are 796,000. Canvas cannot contain the demand. Frederick Gibberd is appointed to design a permanent central area, reached by a road tunnel beneath the runway. A 122-foot control tower rises above the new buildings. The Europa passenger terminal and the Queen’s Building give London Airport an architecture appropriate to a nation that wishes air travel to appear orderly, modern and inevitable.13
Queen Elizabeth II opens the central terminal area in 1955. Visitors do not necessarily come to fly. The airport is itself an attraction. They watch aircraft from the roof, eat in the restaurant, use the post office, attend the cinema or simply observe the ritual of departure. Air travel remains expensive enough to be spectacle for those who cannot yet afford it.14
A terminal is a theatre in which the audience envies the cast.
The cast grows larger. The Europa Building becomes Terminal 2. The Oceanic Terminal becomes Terminal 3. Terminal 1 follows as the jet age brings Boeing 707s, VC10s and Tridents to the runways. In 1970 the first Pan Am Boeing 747 service from New York arrives at Heathrow. In 1976 Concorde begins passenger operations; its later transatlantic services make distance seem less a fact of geography than a problem of engineering.15
The airport has begun as a field outside London. It now alters London’s sense of distance.
It also alters the districts around it.
An airport is not made only by pilots and passengers. Someone must load the bags, clean the cabins, prepare food, maintain engines, drive buses, check documents and keep the terminal awake through the night. In the 1950s and 1960s, Heathrow recruits workers from the Commonwealth, including South Asians with roots in India, Pakistan and what is now Bangladesh. Many settle in Southall, Hounslow and the western suburbs.16
The airport that removed one rural community helps to shape several new urban ones. Families organise their lives around shifts and flight times. Shops, places of worship and streets beyond the perimeter change with them. Heathrow becomes both gateway and employer, a machine for joining distant cities that also rearranges the neighbourhoods beside its fence.
A runway is a connection in one direction and a barrier in another.
For its first twenty years, however, its official name remains London Airport. That name is useful but generic. It identifies the city served, not the ground occupied. Croydon had been London’s airport. Other airports will also claim London while standing at varying distances from it. A global gateway needs something less transferable.
In 1966, London Airport is officially renamed Heathrow.17
The act is more consequential than it sounds.
A small agricultural place-name, once sufficient for a road and a handful of farms, is attached to an international airport. Airlines print it. Pilots speak it. Departure boards display it from New York to Delhi, Johannesburg to Tokyo. A word that once helped neighbours distinguish one part of Harmondsworth parish from another becomes one of the world’s great synonyms for arrival and delay.
The airport takes the name of the village it destroyed.
This can be read as commemoration. It can also be read as possession.
The village no longer requires the word. The airport does.
Yet even an airport that transforms distance remains awkward to reach from the city it serves. For years, passengers travelling by Underground bring their luggage as far as Hounslow West, then transfer to buses for the final journey. The Piccadilly line is deep, electric and urban; the airport is beyond it, served by road and patience.18
Plans for an extension are discussed from the 1950s and approved in 1970. Hatton Cross opens in 1975. New trains are designed with additional space for luggage, an admission that the passenger who carries a suitcase occupies the city differently from one who carries only a newspaper.18
On 16 December 1977, Queen Elizabeth II opens the Piccadilly line extension to Heathrow Central. London becomes the first capital to connect its central Underground system directly with its principal international airport. The rails arrive beneath the central terminal area, allowing a traveller to descend at Piccadilly Circus and rise, without changing mode of transport, into the machinery of international flight.19
The station artwork makes the promise explicit.
Tom Eckersley designs a sequence of murals using overlapping silhouettes from the rear of Concorde: fuselage, tail and fin reduced to bright, clean shapes. The aircraft does not need to be shown whole. In the 1970s, the outline is enough. It means speed, engineering and a future that expects to arrive early.20
Heathrow Central is an unusual Underground station because there is no neighbourhood waiting immediately outside it.
At Blackfriars, one can climb towards the river and search for the vanished priory. At Charing Cross, the streets still lead towards the place where the medieval monument stood. At Heathrow, the station releases the passenger into another transport system. Signs direct the flow towards check-in, security, arrivals and gates. The destination is designed to be passed through.
The station name must therefore perform more work than most.
It tells passengers not where they are in London, but which part of an airport they have reached.
As the airport expands, the name becomes an inventory. When Terminal 4 opens in 1986, Heathrow Central is renamed Heathrow Terminals 1, 2, 3. A separate station serves Terminal 4. Terminal 5 gains its own station in 2008.21
Then the inventory becomes inaccurate.
Terminal 1 closes in June 2015. For several months the Underground continues to announce a terminal that no passenger can use. The building remains, but the number has become a ghost. In January 2016 the station is renamed again: Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3.22
A name that began as landscape has become wayfinding.
Heath.
Row.
Terminals 2 & 3.
Each version records a different system for organising the same ground.
Walk through the station now and the original village seems beyond recovery. Escalators, lifts and corridors deliver passengers beneath concrete, roadways and terminal buildings. The old Heathrow Road cannot be followed. Shrub End has no front door. The Plough and Harrow has no bar. There is no platform sign for the kingfishers.
Yet traces remain at the edges and in archives. The cannon marking William Roy’s baseline stands near the northern perimeter, a reminder that the land was measured before it was flown from. Harmondsworth survives beyond the airport boundary with its medieval great barn. Photographs preserve Heathrow Hall, the Three Magpies, farm families and lanes. Archaeological objects preserve lives for which even the village was a late arrival.
Most powerful of all is the name.
In 2025, Heathrow handles 84.5 million passengers, the busiest year in its history. They arrive with passports, wheeled cases, reunion signs, missed connections and the private fatigue of long-distance travel. Many never see London beyond the railway journey. For them, Heathrow is not a vanished hamlet or even a district. It is Britain’s first interior: carpet, glass, queue, instruction.23
Then they descend to the Underground.
A Piccadilly line train waits beneath the terminals. Its passengers are beginning journeys that once required a ship, a coach, a sequence of railways or an imagination willing to accept that certain places could never be reached. Above them, aircraft depart towards cities whose names fill the boards. Below them, a train prepares for Cockfosters.
The contrast is comic only until one understands its scale. The local and the global occupy the same tunnel.
Listen when the announcement comes.
This is Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3.
The words sound entirely modern: operational, numbered, exact. But at their centre is a rural name older than the airport, the runways and the railway. It belonged to people who grew food for London, kept animals beside the road and knew where the kingfishers nested.
The airport removed their village from the map.
Then it placed the village’s name on maps throughout the world.
Once Heathrow sent strawberries east before dawn.
Now it sends its name everywhere.
Notes and Sources
Philip Sherwood, Heathrow — The Lost Hamlet. Sherwood reconstructs the settlement from maps, photographs and local records. Heathrow contained historic farmhouses, cottages, ponds, a mission hall and the Plough and Harrow public house. Construction of the airport caused the destruction of Heathrow and substantial parts of neighbouring settlements; the Duke of Northumberland’s River was diverted during the works.↩
Sherwood, Heathrow — The Lost Hamlet, and Heathrow Airport, “Company FAQs”. Heathrow lay along the western edge of Hounslow Heath in the parish of Harmondsworth. Heathrow’s official history identifies the airport name as deriving from the ancient agricultural settlement of Heath Row.↩
London Borough of Hillingdon, “Where once were gardens”. Census evidence records at least twenty market gardeners and 120 market-garden labourers around Harmondsworth in 1901. Strawberries were a principal crop sent to London by the Great Western Railway; local farms also produced a broad range of vegetables.↩
Ordnance Survey, “William Roy’s surveying baseline: the 240th anniversary” and “Heathrow Airport honours the work of Major General William Roy”. Roy measured a baseline of approximately 27,404 feet across Hounslow Heath in 1784 for the Anglo-French survey. Its north-western portion is now occupied by Heathrow Airport, and its terminal is marked by a vertically set cannon near the Northern Perimeter Road.↩
London Museum, “A history of London’s Heathrow Airport”. Test pilot Norman MacMillan made an emergency landing in the area in 1925, recognised its suitability for aviation and recommended it to Richard Fairey.↩
Heathrow Airport, “Our history”. In 1930 Richard Fairey paid £15,000 for a 150-acre site and established the Great West Aerodrome, initially with a grass runway and a small group of buildings. Some sources date the aerodrome’s earliest operation to 1929; Heathrow’s corporate history uses the 1930 purchase date.↩
University of West London Archives, “The end of World War II and the development of Heathrow Airport”. Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 Greater London Plan considered post-war airport provision. The Heath Row site was favoured for its location west of London, drainage, distance from eastern industrial smoke and road access.↩
Heathrow Airport, “Our history”; University of West London Archives, “The end of World War II and the development of Heathrow Airport”; and London Museum, “A history of London’s Heathrow Airport”. The government requisitioned Fairey’s aerodrome and surrounding land in 1944 for a projected RAF base serving long-range movements to the Far East. Residents were evicted, buildings demolished and runway construction begun.↩
Sherwood, Heathrow — The Lost Hamlet. David and Naomi Wild were evicted from Shrub End in 1944 and the house was demolished. The Wild family had farmed in the parish for more than three centuries. John Wild’s contemporary “Lament for Heathrow” records the residents’ sense of loss.↩
London Museum, “A history of London’s Heathrow Airport”. Excavation associated with wartime construction identified the Iron Age enclosure called Caesar’s Camp. Archaeological work before Terminal 5 later recovered approximately 80,000 artefacts covering around 9,000 years of human activity.↩
London Museum, “A history of London’s Heathrow Airport”, and Heathrow Airport, “Our history”. A converted Lancaster named Starlight departed for Buenos Aires on 1 January 1946; London Museum gives a journey time exceeding thirty-five hours. The airport formally opened to passengers later in 1946.↩
Heathrow Airport, “Our history”, and London Museum, “A history of London’s Heathrow Airport”. The first passenger facilities used former military marquees furnished with floral armchairs, settees, tables and flowers. The tents lacked heating, and wooden duckboards protected passengers from the muddy airfield.↩ ↩
Heathrow Airport, “Our history”. Passenger numbers rose from 63,000 in the first operational year to 796,000 in 1951. Frederick Gibberd’s permanent central-area plan included road access beneath a runway, a 122-foot control tower, the Europa passenger terminal and the Queen’s Building.↩
London Museum, “A history of London’s Heathrow Airport”, and Heathrow Airport, “Our history”. Queen Elizabeth II opened the Central Terminal Area and control tower in 1955. The complex included public attractions and amenities such as a viewing terrace, restaurant, post office, cinema and lecture hall.↩
London Museum, “A history of London’s Heathrow Airport”, and Heathrow Airport, “Our history”. Terminal 1 opened as the jet age expanded the airport. Pan Am introduced Boeing 747 service from New York to Heathrow in 1970, and Concorde began scheduled passenger operations from Heathrow in 1976.↩
London Museum, “A history of London’s Heathrow Airport”. The museum records that workers were recruited from Commonwealth countries during the 1950s and 1960s and that many South Asian families settled in nearby areas including Southall and Hounslow.↩
Heathrow Airport, “Our history”, and London Museum, “A history of London’s Heathrow Airport”. London Airport was officially renamed Heathrow in 1966.↩
Transport for London Corporate Archives, Research Guide No. 41: A Brief History of the Piccadilly Line, and London Transport Museum, “The Piccadilly line”. Before the extension, passengers changed with their luggage from the Underground to buses at Hounslow West. The Heathrow extension was approved in 1970; Hatton Cross opened in 1975. The new train fleet provided additional luggage space for airport passengers.↩ ↩
London Transport Museum, “Queen Elizabeth II officially opening the Piccadilly line extension”, and London Museum, “A history of London’s Heathrow Airport”. Queen Elizabeth II opened Heathrow Central station on 16 December 1977. London Museum describes the direct Underground connection between a capital and its principal airport as the first of its kind.↩
London Transport Museum, “Tom Eckersley: master graphic designer and king of collage” and “Concorde mural from Heathrow Central station”. Eckersley’s 1977 platform artwork used overlapping outlines of Concorde’s rear fuselage and tail.↩
Transport for London Corporate Archives, Research Guide No. 41. Heathrow Central opened on 16 December 1977; it became Heathrow Terminals 1, 2, 3 on 14 April 1986 and Heathrow Terminals 2, 3 in January 2016. Heathrow Terminal 4 station opened in 1986 and Heathrow Terminal 5 station in 2008.↩
Heathrow Airport, “Behind the scenes — Inside Terminal 1”, and “Our history”. Terminal 1’s final passenger flight departed on 29 June 2015, after which its airlines transferred elsewhere. TfL removed the terminal number from the station name in January 2016.↩
Heathrow (SP) Limited, Results for the year ended 31 December 2025. Heathrow reported 84.5 million passengers in 2025, its highest annual total to that date. Transport for London’s current station page confirms the official name “Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3 Underground Station”.↩