Cranford, TW5: a medieval church, a ruined stable block and no station

What is left of the village

Cranford Park sits behind the houses off the Bath Road, and St Dunstan's church stands in it, medieval and still in use, with a churchyard that has been there a very long time. Beside it is the old stable block of a house that was pulled down in the 1940s, a ruin with a roof on it. The M4 runs along the northern edge and the noise is a distant hum that stops registering after about five minutes among the trees.

It takes twenty minutes to walk and it changes the feel of an entire evening, which is a disproportionate return for twenty minutes. Several guests who assumed there was nothing whatever in TW5 have come out the other side of that walk in a different mood.

No station, and what that means in practice

The nearest Underground is Hounslow West, twenty two minutes away on foot along a main road with lorries on it. Hatton Cross is thirty minutes. Both are walkable in the technical sense and neither is a walk anybody enjoys, so in practice every arrival in Cranford is by car.

From central London by road it is about forty minutes at night and considerably worse at five in the afternoon, when the Bath Road and the approach roads are solid. A late start is a fast start here. A six o'clock start means somebody spends the first half hour of it apologising for a queue, and we would rather set the time at nine and avoid the apology.

The beds are on the Bath Road, four minutes away

Cranford itself has no hotel. What it has is proximity to the eastern end of the Bath Road, where three large hotels sit within a few minutes of each other. One of them has a garden under a glass roof in the middle of the building, palm trees and a pool and a bar around it, which is a genuinely strange thing to find on a road like that.

Every one of those addresses is technically in Hayes rather than Cranford, which is the kind of distinction that only matters when you are giving directions to a driver. None of them has any arrangement with us. They are listed because they are four minutes from the park gates and because guests stay in them.

The shape of a Cranford evening

It is a car evening and there is no use pretending otherwise. Six o'clock at the park gates if the light holds, twenty minutes among trees that were here long before the runway, and then four minutes by road to a hotel that could be in any country in the world. The contrast between those two halves is the point of the whole thing.

After that it is a long dinner. Nothing in TW5 is open late and nothing needs to be, because the hotels along that road run kitchens that do not close early and bars that stay open for their own guests. The evening ends where you are staying, which out here is the sensible and usual arrangement.

Two companions who drive out here

Luna will walk you through the churchyard and the stable block before dinner if there is any light left, and she sings along to things in the car without asking whether that is acceptable. Milena is decisive about restaurants and about most other things, prefers that glass roofed atrium, and will not take anything shorter than three hours out here because the drive is forty minutes each way.

Bianka is a few minutes east at the Heston end and Michelle comes down from Hayes. Everyone else is in On The Route.

The nearest pages to this one

The terminals are ten minutes west by car and have their own hotel by hotel breakdown. Hayes is north with an Elizabeth line station and a town centre. Hatton Cross is the gateway station on the southern side. And Hounslow West is the nearest tube and the nearest high street, twenty two minutes on foot or five by car.