The exit from the field is through a hole in a hedge that dumps me on an over-active B-road. Brushing hawthorn flowers from my hair, it’s as if I’ve dropped in from another era rather than skipped across from Wyke Green. This farmer is clearly no friend of the Ramblers and I can’t blame him – they don’t so much walk as organize mobile conversations.
This is now the final approach into Hounslow Heath, across the terrain where Maxwell wrote of getting lost when the fields of Heston were built over in the inter-war years. He’d returned to the area to take a friend on a ‘country stroll’: ‘When I knew this walk it was pleasant field-paths, shaded by noble elms, as rural a ramble as the heart could desire, but now it is all bricks and mortar and new roads all exactly alike.’ I pick up one of Maxwell’s field paths I’d read about on the train. It leads me behind gardens of smoky BBQs and backyard water-fights over the Great West Road into Lampton.
I’d heard of Heston because of its famous motorway service station that serves cracking 24-hour fry-ups. Lampton on the other hand was virgin ground, a medieval hamlet hanging on in the suburbs. Cutting across Lampton Park there is more cricket, but this time an informal occasion with only half the players wearing whites. I ask the lad at long-on who’s playing and he tells me with a smile that it’s just a ‘friends’ match’.
Charles Dickens was apparently very fond of Lampton and often visited Lampton Hall. There are certain associations that any self-respecting London suburb will try to claim – a pub where Dick Turpin hid out, any kind of link to Dickens and a brush with royalty. Hounslow ticks all these boxes convincingly with a great big fat marker pen. I don’t doubt that Dickens sojourned in this park; I fancy loitering a while myself and sit down next to the path to admire a great chunk of sandstone.
Lampton Sarsen stone
I read the plaque beside the Sarsen stone as kids whizz past me on scooters. The gist is that the rock was formed from a bed of sand that lay beneath the sea covering this area around 50 million years ago. There’s a number to get your head around – Dickens coming out here 130-odd years ago I can cope with, but 50 million years ago and Hounslow part of a great sea? The sandstone gradually worked its way nearer the surface to rest on the London Clay about half a million years ago before it was excavated from a gravel pit.
The land submerged in water, then large beasts roaming the wild forests are sobering thoughts when looking across at children playing, gaggles of gossiping teenage girls and lads passing a ball around. This world we hold so dear is transient and there will come a time when all that is left of Lampton is this lump of archaic sandstone, and possibly the plaque.
I pass through a tunnel beneath the Piccadilly Line and into a clichéd landscape of outer London suburbia. An old lady watches me from her chair in a glass porch. There are bricks stacked in the front garden of the house next door waiting to be transformed into an extension. Tomorrow the men will emerge to wash their cars on the drive. The planes bound for Heathrow almost skim the chimney tops on their descent.
Only now do I realize that I haven’t stopped for food since the café in Gunnersbury Park and have run out of water. But as an experienced suburban survivor I know how to source provisions in this seemingly barren landscape. I nip into the corner shop and bag a samosa and a can of Stella Artois.
With provisions for the onward journey I turn into Staines Road. The evocative images painted so vividly by Walter George Bell in Where London Sleeps loom back into view. This was one of the principal old coaching roads and the Middlesex section of the Roman road Via Trinobantes (better known as Stane Street) that passed through Pontes (Staines) on its way to the great town of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester in Hampshire). It is along the pavement here that the gibbets would have decorated the roadside with their putrid drooping cadavers of highwaymen and footpads.
A highway robbery was reported in the Hounslow Chronicle in 2011 when three masked men leapt from a car and snatched a backpack containing cash and jewellery from two men ‘oriental in appearance’. Aside from the use of a dark green car as the getaway vehicle, this could have been a crime from a different age. Perhaps Claude Duval or Galloping Dick slipped through a tear in the space–time continuum and then landed back in the 18th century with a stash of worthless bank notes.
This robbery lacks the class of the crimes committed by Old Mob the Highwayman, who also appeared in a double act known as Hawkins and Simpson (I bet they argued over whose name came first). Once when Old Mob robbed a stagecoach on Hounslow Heath he consoled the victims with a ‘story in verse’, earning himself the moniker of ‘the poetical highwayman’. He also held up the coach of the Duchess of Portsmouth, who stupidly used the ‘Do you know who I am?’ line. Old Mob treated this with the contempt that a bouncer on the door of Bungalow 8 shows to a Z-list celebrity trying to gain entry using the same refrain. He told her to pay up because he was the King of Hounslow Heath and needed money as much as the other king. He even had the front to rob the feared Judge Jeffreys, a man known as the ‘hanging judge’. Jeffreys thought mentioning his name would earn him a pardon; instead it led to a very long lecture on morals and ethics from the pistol-toting Old Mob, rounded off by ‘thundering a volley of foul oaths’. The judge duly delivered his purse.
The highwaymen were the heroes of their day. They occupied the position we now reserve for footballers and X-Factor winners. They stuck two fingers up at authority and conducted themselves with a swagger and style that even Mick Jagger would be hard pushed to match.
Look at the exploits of Sixteen-String Jack, the original ‘dandy highwayman’, who earned his nickname from wearing ‘breeches with eight strings at each knee’. After being acquitted for a robbery on Hounslow Road early in his career, instead of keeping a low profile he headed straight to Bagnigge Wells near King’s Cross, the trendiest nightspot in Regency London. He strolled in dressed in a ‘scarlet coat, tambour waistcoat, white silk stockings, and a laced hat, and publicly declared himself to be “Sixteen-String Jack, the Highwayman”’.
Shortly before his final capture he attended a public execution at Tyburn. These were big occasions and positions at the front were at a premium, reserved for the most wealthy and famous. Jack pushed his way through the crowd and then entered the roped-off gallows area protected by the constables. He requested permission to stand upon the platform, observing to the assembled throng that ‘perhaps it is proper that I should be a spectator on this occasion.’
However flamboyant his public image, he was ultimately sentenced to death for stealing the measly sum of one shilling and sixpence from Princess Amelia’s doctor in Gunnersbury Park. The night before his execution he had a party with seven ladies in his cell and went to the scaffold in a ‘new suit of pea-green cloth, a ruffled shirt, and his breeches were, on this occasion, adorned with the usual sixteen strings – but this time they were of silver!’
Just before the Heath there is a plaque commemorating the fact that this was the entrance to ‘London Terminal Aerodrome Hounslow Heath’, from where the first commercial flights in Britain took off in 1919. That year a challenge was laid down by the Australian government, offering a prize of A£10,000 to the first Australian to fly from Great Britain to Australia within a period of thirty days. What followed was something akin to an episode of Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines pursuing that pigeon.
Six aircraft took off from Hounslow Heath aiming to make the inaugural flight from Europe to Australia. The Sopwith Wallaby had a hell of a time, with the crew being imprisoned as Bolsheviks in Yugoslavia, suffering a cracked engine in Constantinople and finally crash-landing in Bali. The Alliance P.2 nose-dived into an orchard in Surbiton killing both crew-members. The Blackburn Kangaroo staggered its way across Europe before finally getting tangled in the fence of a mental hospital in Crete with the crew unhurt. The Martinsyde Type A crashed in the sea off Corfu. The Airco DH.9 did make it to Australia but took a