Map Addict. Mike Parker
The fogs, footpads and gibbets may be long gone from Hounslow Heath, but the land still has a melancholy tang to it, if only thanks to the fact that so much of it has been eaten alive by Heathrow Airport, located there for precisely the same reasons (vast expanse, flat as a pancake, near London) as Roy’s base line. The airport has swallowed whole villages along the northern part of the line, its route south-east has been filled in with shops, factories, houses, roads and all the normal suburban detritus of the outskirts of London. The line, dotted across field and factory, and marked portentously as General Roy’s Base, used to appear on OS maps up until the early twentieth century, though not since. Strangely, the northern end of it at Heathrow is labelled, on the current OS 1:25 000 Explorer map, with the supremely wordy ‘Cannon: West End of General Roy’s Base (site of)’; although the cannon is firmly there in precisely the spot indicated, there is nothing ‘site of’ about it. The other end, at Hampton—which is far easier, and more pleasurable, to find—doesn’t even warrant that, and goes completely unmarked.
Trying to trace the line today, I was reminded of the late Linda Smith’s immortal observation that Greater London was something of a misnomer, for ‘the further you get away from the middle of it, London doesn’t really get greater—it’s more Lesser London’. She came from Erith (‘not so much the city that never sleeps, more the town that lies awake all night staring at the ceiling’), which sits crusted on the rim of the capital in much the same way as Feltham, Bedfont and Hanworth, the sprawls that now cover William Roy’s historic line. There are other invisible lines to contend with here: these undistinguished, indistinguishable towns are firmly on the other side of the tracks from leafy Hampton (as in Court), where Roy’s measurement ended. This lies in that weird little south-western corner of Greater London, the Twickenham-Richmond triangle: smug and tweaked, embarrassed Tory so voting LibDem, death by bungalow and leylandii.
After Major-General Roy conducted his experiments, wooden posts were interred in the ground at either end of the recorded base line as a memorial. In 1791, eleven months after Roy’s death, the party led by the Duke of Richmond, charged with re-measuring the line for the Board of Ordnance, found that the posts were rotting and so they were replaced by upended cannons. There, wondrously, they still remain. Both cannons have seen untold change unfold around them over two centuries. The southern one, at Hampton, witnessed the demolition of the borough workhouse nearby; it thence lived in an area of open ground known as Cannon Field until Twickenham Borough Council built housing estates on it in the late 1940s. At least they left the cannon intact and had the good grace to name the two nearest culde-sacs Roy Grove (where the cannon can be found sat in a grassy gap between two post-war semis) and Cannon Close (which, indeed, it is). This is Hampton as the acme of suburbia, so much so that the street opposite is Acacia Road.
Handily, there’s a bus—the 285 Kingston-on-Thames to Heathrow—that almost precisely connects the two cannons, taking a route that’s only a little over a mile longer than William Roy’s 5.19-mile straight line. The good general wouldn’t recognise it these days. The bus coughs its way up the Uxbridge Road and into Feltham, doing a quick detour into the Sainsbury’s car park, and passing forlorn-looking light industrial estates, the Clipper Cutz hair salon, the Chirpy Chaps barbers, Cindy’s Nail Bar, Fryday’s chippy, a Subway or two, the A3 roundabout and parades of Metroland semis displaying either a St George’s flag or a ‘No To Heathrow Expansion’ sticker, sometimes both (albeit quite hard to see through the triple glazing).
I broke my journey at Feltham, in order to take a look at another oblique memorial to William Roy, an eponymous modern pub off the High Street. This, it claims, is named after him because of its position more or less halfway along his historic line, although it’s stretching things slightly, as the General Roy pub is nearly a mile to the south of the route. There’s nothing there to indicate its homage to Roy, save for one old map of the district on the wall, showing the Feltham area as a bucolic cluster of villages, before they were entirely obliterated by the spreading gut of the capital and its main airport. The pub is pitched at workers from the nearby industrial park, home to something glassy and chromey called the Feltham Corporate Centre—a name to strike even greater terror into the loins than the town’s rather better-known Young Offenders’ Institution.
From Feltham, the 285 fairly closely follows the route of the base line north-west towards Hatton Cross and Heathrow. Even without the growing taste of diesel in the air and the ear-splitting screams of the jets overhead, you’d know that there’s a major airport coming up. It dominates everything, especially when the tired, tatty—and increasingly impossible to sell—houses finally give way to the dispiriting landscape of international aviation: the pavement-less roads clogged with traffic, the giant hangars, mysterious metal buildings housing anything from security firms to haulage companies, car parks galore, miles of razor wire, CCTV whirring and winking in every direction and a collection of hotels that no one, surely, has ever spent a second night in.
Heathrow Airport only came into existence thanks to government sleight-of-hand at the end of the Second World War. The site, on the richest agricultural land in the country, was commandeered under Emergency Powers in 1943, purportedly for the RAF. It was never used as such. The then Under-Secretary of State for Air, Harold Balfour, revealed in his autobiography that the requisition and construction work undertaken were entirely bogus, and that the plans had always been to turn the airfield into London’s principal civil airport come the end of hostilities. Playing the national emergency card simply allowed the authorities to circumvent any normal planning procedures—and so the pattern continues.
Even Major-General William Roy fell foul of the airport zealots’ economy with the truth. When the never-to-be-used RAF base was being built in 1944, the memorial cannon that marked the north-western end of his base line was removed, in a theatrical attempt to demonstrate that no impediment—even one just five feet tall—should be placed in the way of our magnificent men in their flying machines. Sense eventually prevailed, and the cannon was returned in 1968, and finally replaced in its original position four years later, where it still squats. It’s not easy to locate: indeed, the irony is that you need a bloody good map to find it. Tucked away in a grassy corner nibbled out of a long-stay car park, the cannon sits alone and unloved, overlooking the airport’s main police station and the northern perimeter fence. You’d hardly notice it, especially compared with the huge banner that hangs off the car park fence above it: ‘Exclusive Parking: Park Today. Complimentary 15 Minute Spa Treatment’—well, who wouldn’t want a rub down from a car park attendant? In Paris, you suspect that a monument this significant would have been turned into a vast pyramid, visited by coachloads of schoolchildren by day and extravagantly flood-lit by night.
I paused, gulped down a little more airborne diesel, and felt strangely proud of the British way.
The original index map for the OS 1:50 000 series: there’s Aysgarth, but no Sheffield
Ordnance Survey maps in all their shapes and sizes are the most beautiful manifestation of twentieth-century British functional design. Ever since I can remember, I have spent stolen moments, wasted evenings and secret hours studying the mystery and beauty of the Ordnance Survey maps of these islands. The concrete trig points that had originally been used in their creation became almost as powerful in mystical properties for me as standing stones.
˜ Bill Drummond, 45
Grimsby and Cleethorpes. Could there be a more inauspicious debut to a lifetime’s obsession? It was 1974 and the Ordnance Survey had just published its first swathe of new 1:50 000 maps, the metric replacement for the longstanding, much-loved one-inch system that had divided the country since the very first map in 1801. Whether it was their eye-catching colour (a goutish pinky-purple) or stark 1970s visual functionality, I don’t know, but as soon as I saw the new maps in W. H. Smith, I was hooked. I wanted them, and before I discovered how easy they were to steal, I was even prepared to save up my pocket money