East Bedfont

East Bedfont is a village green that Heathrow moved in next to and never stopped shouting over. The Norman church on the edge of the green has outlasted the Reformation and the Civil War, and these days it mostly loses arguments with the flight path. Most of what grew up around it was built for the people who load the planes, fuel the planes and drive the lorries away from the planes, and nobody wasted money pretending otherwise. Captain Webb, the first man to swim the Channel, lived here for a few years and then left to swim the rapids below Niagara Falls, which is still the most extreme way anyone has found to get out of Bedfont.