Hatton including Hatton Cross is a small settlement and locality in the London boroughs of Hillingdon and Hounslow, on the south-eastern edge of London Heathrow Airport and straddling the A30 road. Prior to 1965 it was in the county of Middlesex.
The area was for many decades a notorious place for highway robberies; a surviving coaching inn, The Green Man, has a hiding-hole behind the chimney. A nearby road is named Dick Turpin Way in reference to the area's history. Aside from the heyday of such problems in the 17th and 18th centuries, the area had attractive rural houses with gardens. One of these was built by Edward III and visited by Richard II. Another, centuries later, was the home of Sir Frederick Pollock, 1st Baronet through to his grandson, first cousin of the first Viscount Hanworth, resident at the much larger Hanworth Park.
It remains technically a hamlet or neighbourhood of Bedfont, from which it is separated by a field and local sports facilities. It is flanked to the north and north-west by major roads, depots, warehouses, hotels and parking areas associated with London Heathrow Airport, which take up the north of the locality, leading to the consolidation of that area into Hillingdon since 1994. It is joined, to the south, by Bedfont and North Feltham, and to the east by the River Crane, across which is Hounslow West. The settled part is the interior and one side of a triangle south of the dualled A30. Further south a line of houses continues, which faces Hounslow Urban Farm and is then engulfed by naming into the North Feltham Trading Estate, such as Feltham Ambulance Station beside the farm. The current naming has eaten into what was once squarely Hatton, just as Heathrow has from the opposite direction.
Hatton's name comes from Anglo-Saxon H?eßtun = "heath farmstead"; until 1819 its cultivated area and small residential gardens were surrounded by heath.
|
