by Chris Green

Created on: February 22, 2008

If you live in a big city suburb, you may find the concept of a "home town" a tad odd, but I've tried to think of my own "turf" in this way, and do you know what, it actually comes out sounding quite interesting!

Prior to this I hadn't thought about where I live as my home town despite having lived in the area for all but the first 5 years of my life.

Lost, no sense of direction?

No, it's just that I live in one of the outer London boroughs where you don't actually feel that you can call ALL of Europe's biggest city "home", neither do I think of myself as a "Londoner" in a "Cor blimey guv, yer a real gennelman an' no mistake" kind of way, yet my borough bears the name of "Hounslow", which is somewhere ELSE that I don't actually live either, although it's only about two miles from my house.

The London Borough of Hounslow, to give the area its full name was formed in around 1967 as a result of the dissolution of the old County Of Middlesex, and the combining of the two erstwhile Middlesex boroughs of Heston & Isleworth and Brentford & Chiswick, which in itself caused a deal of friction. To this day, just try telling someone who lives in snootier Chiswick "Oh, that's in Hounslow isn't it?" and see how far you get with that as an ice-breaker at a party.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Yes, I'd like to move; the borough, I mean.

Situated as it is, in a western slice of the circular pie that is the Greater London area, it not only has Europe's busiest airport on its doorstep, but some of Europe's busiest road traffic, not surprisingly taking people and freight to and from the airport! It therefore follows that it's not the quietest place in the world, with aircraft landings commencing at around 4.30 a.m. (so much for the BAA's definition of night flying restrictions).

However, if you're silly enough to buy a house under either of the two main flight-paths, then you ask for everything you get. Away from these two noise footprints, it's like any other outer urban borough, and at least you know that, this close to the runways, you won't have stray aircraft flying over you! If that third runway ever gets built in my lifetime, I'm outta here!

It's easy to forget with the M4 freeway and A4 highway running through the borough like the aorta and vena cava of west London, that Hounslow also has a history as a stage-coach stop.

The old London-Bath main road runs right through the High Street, still called Bath Road at the western end, and in former times would have been a first overnight

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