Feltham escorts, TW13 and TW14: the lakes, the air park and an early flight

Bedfont Lakes after everyone has gone

Bedfont Lakes Country Park is a worked out gravel pit turned into open water and reed beds, ten minutes from Feltham station and a completely different world from the roundabouts that surround it. Two hundred acres of water and birds a quarter of an hour from an airport, and after six in the evening there is almost nobody in it.

A full circuit takes about forty minutes at a pace that allows for conversation. The water holds the light longer than the sky does, which is the reason to be there at the end of the day rather than the beginning of it. There is no lighting, so the walk needs to finish before the light does.

An aerodrome with the grass grown back

Hanworth Air Park is the other two hundred acres: an open field where aeroplanes were built and flown through the 1930s, with the old house still standing at the edge of it. At dusk it is entirely empty. It is ten minutes from the Hounslow Road hotels and is the walk most guests end up taking without having planned to.

Neither park is a sight in the tourist sense. They are simply large, quiet and close, which in this corner of west London counts for a great deal more than a view.

One station, and the airport behind it

Feltham station is three minutes from the high street with South Western Railway trains into Waterloo in around half an hour, which is quicker than plenty of places that feel far more central. Hatton Cross, on the Piccadilly line, is the nearest tube and it is a twenty five minute walk away, so in practice nobody walks it. That gap is worth knowing about before you plan an evening that assumes a tube.

By road the central terminals are about fifteen minutes and Terminal 4 rather less. The Great South West Road handles that traffic and does it badly between four and seven, so a late start is a fast start and an early one is not.

The beds on the Hounslow Road

A large hotel sits on the Hounslow Road at TW14 9AD, between the town and the airport, with a proper bar in it, and it is where most people out here end up without ever having chosen it. The one on the high street is the plain and central option. The budget hotel at TW6 3AF, by Terminal 4, is ten minutes away by road and is the sensible choice if your flight is the thing shaping the evening.

We have no arrangement with any hotel, here or anywhere else on this site. These are the addresses guests give us. TW13 is mostly houses and a good share of the evenings arranged here happen at one.

Two companions, both of whom prefer long bookings

Karolina arrives at eight, walks the whole circuit of the lakes without hurrying it for anybody, and does not fill silences. She is resting until the second of October and dates from then can be held now. Thea does the opposite end of the clock: a half past five table, the air park while the light holds, and back before the road fills up again.

Roxi comes across from the TW4 side and Stacy down from Whitton when the fixture list allows. Every portrait is in On The Route, and the ladder of hours is on the rates page.

What is around it

Hounslow West is twenty minutes north east by road and gets you back to a tube. Whitton is east across the Crane valley with a high street and a station. Twickenham is twenty five minutes away and is the prettiest thing within reach of here. West of all of it, the Heathrow terminals are a quarter of an hour by car, which is the reason half of the rooms in TW14 are occupied at all.