Hounslow Central, TW3: the Lampton Road hotels and the late trains west

Two minutes from the barrier to the High Street

Hounslow Central station opens straight onto the High Street, so the walk from the ticket barrier to the shops takes two minutes and involves no hill, no subway and no dual carriageway. Hounslow East is eight minutes along the same Piccadilly line and is the better choice if you are staying towards Kingsley Road. Hounslow station, twelve minutes south on foot, is a separate railway altogether, with South Western Railway trains into Waterloo, and it earns its keep on the nights when the tube has finished and you have not.

From the middle of town the Piccadilly line is the honest answer and the honest number is around fifty minutes. Nobody working these postcodes is going to tell you it is twenty. What the line gives back is hours at the other end: it runs until about half past midnight and straight through on Friday and Saturday nights, so an evening in TW3 can finish later than an evening in places that look far more convenient on a map.

Nearly every bed is on Lampton Road

Lampton Road climbs north from the station and holds almost all of the town centre rooms. The one at TW3 1JG is the plainest and the nearest to the shops. A few doors further up, TW3 1JL takes most of the late arrivals, for the simple reason that it is a short walk from a tube station rather than a taxi fare around a perimeter fence. Out on the Great West Road, TW5 0BU suits anyone who has arrived by car and would rather park than walk.

None of those hotels has any arrangement with us, and none of them has been asked for one. They appear here because they are where guests in TW3 happen to be staying. A serviced flat above the High Street or a private address works in precisely the same way, and the road name plus a number is the whole of what is needed.

Who books an evening in TW3

Three kinds of evening keep happening here. The first belongs to the late arrival who has worked out that the tube beats the taxi and would rather sleep in a town than beside a runway. The second belongs to residents, because TW3 is mostly flats and the flats are mostly full of people who never leave the borough for dinner. The third belongs to the crew and the contractor, in for a fortnight, out of the terminal by six, and thoroughly finished with lanyards and hotel bars for the day.

Nobody on this page is being sold a West End evening in fancy dress. Hounslow is a working town with very good food, a park worth an hour and a cinema that is never full. Come for what is actually here and it is excellent company. Come expecting Mayfair and you will spend the night disappointed by somewhere that was never trying to be it.

How the hours usually fall

Dinner first, because the food is the town's strongest argument for itself. The High Street has been feeding people properly for decades and none of it is performing for anybody. After that, Lampton Park if there is light left in the sky, or the last screening at the Blenheim Centre, five minutes from the station and rarely more than a third full once the clock passes ten.

By midnight almost everything has shut. That is not a complaint, it is simply a thing worth planning around: either the evening moves back to wherever you are staying, or it ends at a sensible hour and everyone sleeps. Both are fine. Iris will say which shape she thinks fits before anything is agreed, and she is usually right about it.

The companions who work these streets

Angelika is anchored in TW3 and likes to take the long way round Lampton Park before anything has been decided. Molly will not take a six o'clock start and is cheerful about saying so: she wants dinner at nine and the last film at eleven. Samanta meets the late arrivals in the Lampton Road lobbies and is entirely unbothered by an hour that would flatten most people.

From next door, Roxi comes across from the TW4 side, Laura down from the Osterley park gates, and Cindy up from the river at Isleworth when the evening starts later than daylight allows. Every portrait on the list sits in On The Route, and the full ladder of hours is on the rates page.

What is next door

Hounslow West is two stops along the same line and puts you nearer the Bath Road. Fifteen minutes on a bus takes you to the river at Isleworth, which is a village with water at the end of it and almost nothing else. Osterley and its park gates manage a three hundred year old estate and a tube station within three minutes of each other. South of here, Whitton runs towards the stadium, and the Heathrow terminals are a quarter of an hour west on the line you are already standing on.