Hatton Cross, TW6 and TW14: the gateway station and the walkway hotels

What is actually at the junction

A station entrance a minute from the platforms, a bus interchange, a set of maintenance hangars and a great deal of road. There is no high street, no restaurant row and nothing to walk to for pleasure. It would be dishonest to dress that up. Terminal 4 is a twenty five minute walk if you insist on walking it, which almost nobody does, and Feltham station is thirty minutes on foot in the other direction.

What the junction does have is the one thing airport guests care about: a train that arrives every few minutes and puts you inside the central area without stepping outdoors at the far end. From the platform at Hatton Cross to a hotel lift at Terminals 2 and 3 is four minutes of line and a walkway.

The hotels this station serves

The hotel at Terminal 4, TW6 3AF, is joined to the terminal by a covered walkway, so a guest with a morning flight genuinely never has to go outside. The one inside the central area at Terminals 2 and 3 is reached by lift and walkway rather than by road, which is why nobody pulls up outside it in a taxi at one in the morning. At Terminal 5, TW6 2GD is the same idea at the western end, connected over the road.

We have no arrangement with any of them and would not pretend to. They are on this page because a walkway is worth more than a lobby at that hour. Every one of them is reached from Hatton Cross by train rather than by car, which is the practical reason this station has a page of its own.

Timings, told straight

Hatton Cross to Terminal 4 is one stop. To Terminals 2 and 3 it is two stops and about four minutes. To Terminal 5 it is three stops. Coming the other way, central London is roughly fifty minutes to an hour on the Piccadilly line, and that is the number we work from rather than a hopeful one.

The last trains west run until around half past midnight and all night on Fridays and Saturdays. That matters more here than anywhere: a landing at half past eleven is a perfectly ordinary booking on this page rather than an awkward one, and it does not need a car at either end.

How an airport evening is arranged

Send the flight number rather than the time you expect to land, because those two things are frequently strangers. Add the hotel and the terminal, and the room number once you have it. Iris works backwards from the arrivals board, and if the aircraft is delayed the booking moves rather than dying.

Three hours is the minimum out here and the travel is counted inside it, not added to it. That is not a surcharge, it is arithmetic: the run from central London is close to an hour each way. If your flight is at six in the morning, an overnight makes considerably more sense than a short evening that ends when you most want to sleep.

The two who work this end of the line

Liana crosses a hotel lobby as though she has a room upstairs, which is the only skill that matters in a building like that, and she is three minutes from the Terminal 4 walkway. Sonya prefers the hotel inside the central area because nobody arrives at it by taxi; she swims most mornings, says very little, and slows an evening down to match a guest who has been awake for twenty hours. She is back on the eighth of October.

Lucy and Margo both work the terminals from the other side, and Thea comes over from Feltham. The full list is in On The Route.

Where else to look

The terminals themselves have their own page with the hotels set out building by building. Cranford is the old village on the northern side, four minutes by car from the Bath Road. Feltham is south east with a railway station and two large parks. And Hounslow West is three stops back up the line if you would rather be in a town than beside a runway.